


and thirst is all i know

by Sciosa



Category: Fallout: New Vegas
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Honest Hearts DLC, Lonesome Road DLC, M/M, Unrequited, author is not fluent with latin and it definitely shows, boone is a good bro under the right circumstances, but the whole middle kind of happened while i wasn't looking, caesar's legion is a cult you guys, cass is the friend you need but maybe not the friend you want, gratuitous use of latin, gratuitous use of motifs, homebrew post-apocalypse religion, i can believe i finished it holy fuck, i have been writing this thing for five goddamn years, it is a mystery, like i knew where i was starting and ending, like in both the classic and modern sense, someday i will write a romance that is not a total garbage fire, this is not that day, this whole thing really spiraled out of my control tbh, tsela would do really well or really badly in dogs in the vineyard, unACKNOWLEDGED, why does my boy have such bad taste in men?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-29
Updated: 2019-06-29
Packaged: 2020-05-29 14:36:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19402330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sciosa/pseuds/Sciosa
Summary: Semper fidelis,the coyote says, grinning, teeth in a throat.





	and thirst is all i know

**Author's Note:**

> The title is adapted from _To the Desert_ by Benjamin Alire Saenz.

Tsela is born to be a priest. He can still trace the lines of it in his skin, white scars in neat, organized patterns, where living hasn't rendered them unrecognizable-- the lines of his bones, of closeness to Stone, of certainty and compassion, of what is holy. They trace his spine, and throat, and ribs, and fingers, nicked and faded but indelible. His hands were not for violence; his voice not for deceit.

There is a gun in his hand, and there are corpses around him, and when he hears the insistent, nervous sarcasm of the doctor currently prodding anxiously at his torso, he meets the man's eyes, and he smiles without teeth, and he lies.

_Profaned_ , he thinks, and sets that child aside again and again.

* * *

When he is eight years old, his name is Hataashki. Mothers call him this; Fathers call him this.

When he was very young, they tell him, he wandered away from the others, and the Fathers lost track of him for almost an entire day. They searched, and they called, and when they had surrendered hope they walked to the Stone to offer prayers to his ghost. And that is where they found him, curled up asleep in the Stone's shadow, while the priest who preceded him sang in Stone's voice. And with him, they found a shard of black stone, and this they gave to the Mothers, who took it away to make a new knife; and him they gave to the priest, who took him away to make a new priest. And so he was named.

When he is eight years old, his name is Nihimaii. Sisters call him this; Brothers call him this.

When he was very young, they tell him, he wandered away from the others, and the Brothers lost track of him for almost an entire night. They searched, and they called, and when they had surrendered hope they walked to the Stone to offer prayers to his ghost. And that is where they found him, singing Stone songs with a chorus of coyotes, telling their tales to the Stone. And the Brothers clustered around him in nervous rings, and the Sisters circled warily and watched the shadows; and when he finished singing, the coyotes went back into the desert, and the children went back to the fires of the tribe. And so he was named.

When he is eight years old, the Legion comes.

* * *

The other tribes call them Stone Singers, and they call themselves Children. They live in the cliffs and worship in the valleys between them, where Standing Stone shelters over them like a sentinel, watching over the tribe and the land.

In the morning, the Mothers hunt jackrabbits and bighorns through the scree, and check the boundaries, careful traceworks of pale pebbles wider than any man can leap, for any signs of intrusion. The Fathers pluck the fruit from cactus trees with careful fingers, and teach songs to the Brothers and Sisters: "Sun is Setting", and "Come Home", and "Something Is Stalking", and "Ghosts Live In Stone".

The Brothers tend the fires, and learn how to pull poison stings out of flesh. The Sisters chase lizards across the cliffs and practice leaping across chasms without breaking their long strides.

All the time, each one is humming-- private songs to Stone, secret conversations between Brothers and Sisters in the child-tongues that grow between generations, prayers and worship and warnings and instructions and questions and kinship. Theirs is a place of songs, and outsiders know they approach it when the wind starts to sound musical, when the low murmur of Stone Singers coalesces into rising coyote-howl choruses-- “A Stranger Approaches”, the Children sing.

And at night they all come back to the cliffs, to the fires, and the tribe eats, and sings, and sleeps.

This is how Hataashki-Nihimaii remembers them.

* * *

What happens when the Legion comes is not worth dwelling on.

When it is over, he is not a priest. (His hands were not for violence; his hands were not for taking a sacred knife from a Mother's nerveless fingers and driving it into a soldier's fragile throat.)

When there are no Mothers or Fathers left, the Legion arrays around the Brothers and Sisters with sinister teeth and Hataashki makes a choice.

"Yinildzil," he says to the Brothers and Sisters, in the voice of Stone's authority, resonant with the promise of song, and they still and quiet and wait and watch. They are Brothers and Sisters, and he is Nihimaii-- it is his to decide when they will show teeth, and when they will be steadfast. Teeth had done no good. Steadfastness would have to do.

A man he will know later as the Malpais Legate barks nonsense in three different tongues before he manages to scrape "What word?" out of his mouth, dry and flat and songless.

Hataashki-Nihimaii does not know what to tell him. It means what it means.

* * *

They take his Brothers and Sisters away. They take him away. They scatter the children of Stone, and one by one they kill them-- for insolence, disobedience, weakness. They kill the Brothers for refusing to fight; they kill the Sisters for fighting too well.

"Unleash me, Nihimaii," whispers a Sister, curled over him in the dark, her eyes fever-bright, her sand-colored hair shorn down to the scalp. They are not supposed to speak. They are not even supposed to see each other. If a legionary comes, he knows with the certainty of Stone, she will stand in the way of any punishment. She will overshadow him like sheltering stone. "And let me be wild among them. Let me bite."

("We are making you Roman," the Malpais Legate tells him, once. He says it in a language that only he and Hataashki still speak, and then he says it again, in the one that Hataashki has learned from them.)

"You have so many teeth?" he asks, flat and toneless.

She slinks away in the dark, anger and shame in the line of her spine. He misses the comfort of her teeth shining in the dark, her fingers clawing into his shoulders, instantly. By the next week, she is dead. Nihimaii watches them throw the body in with the still-wild mongrels.

The Legion names him Seneca, and he watches the last of his Brothers and Sisters die before they can become Roman, and he buries Hataashki and Nihimaii with them.

* * *

The Legion has a god.

They call it Mars, and say it teaches war, and conquering, and survival, and order. A red god, in a man-shape. A Mother’s god in a Father’s form. 

Seneca does not think about the gods that are around him, beneath him, above him-- in his lungs, in the river, in the campfire-- but he allows himself to think about the red god, sometimes, when he is eating or almost asleep or they have told him to stop and not kill the other slave-trainee with his fingernails and teeth. What the voice of a red god would carry in it. What the hands of a red god would shape.

It would be something like Fire, he thinks; and it would be something like Blood.

He is not a priest. But every member of a tribe is shaped by its god-- what else are tribes for, if not to give the gods good material? 

("We are making you Roman," the Malpais Legate told him, and they did.)

His name is Seneca, and he belongs to the red god, will be shaped by the red god, will carry that voice, will do the work of those hands. It is easy to remember-- there is red all around him, on the tents, on the flags, on the uniforms, on the dust in the pits. He does not know much of Fire's way or Blood's way, but he will learn the red god's way. He will be shaped to fit his place.

* * *

He frightens the others, sometimes, with his intensity, with sharp teeth in his mouth and a slowly building red humour. They are not sure what has changed in him, and it makes them uneasy. They must have had no gods of their own if they cannot recognize the red god here. Not just the slave-trainees, but the legionary instructor, the slave-soldiers who sneer and roll their eyes. _Puppies,_ they say, unfondly, aiming lazy kicks and half-hearted shoves.

He has been kicked, when he was still Hataashki. That was before he was Roman. That was before he had a new god. He has been learning.

He has been learning all the time to be red.

"Move, _puer_ ," snaps a slave-soldier, a stranger as most of them are, and follows up his command with action.

Seneca lets the hit come-- has no illusions that he could avoid it-- but when the red bubbles up and says _eat_ he doesn't argue.

There is a great deal of yelling which Seneca thinks is disproportionate the damage his blunt, childish teeth can do. And then there is a large hand on the back of his neck, and he is lifted, shaken, his thoughts rattled and scattered away. He bares his teeth, optimistically.

"We have found ourselves a coyote among our hounds," says the Malpais Legate dryly. There is smoke in his voice. _Red god_.

Seneca falls obediently limp; after a moment the Malpais Legate sighs, says something in Roman too fast for Seneca to parse it with his mind still shaken and full of red, and he is dropped to the dirt. It is not a long fall.

* * *

(Once, Hataashki watched with silent interest as a foolish Father scaled the Stone to his death. It was not a long fall.)

* * *

_Auribus teneo lupum._

* * *

By the time he is grown, there is smoke in Seneca’s voice at the best of times, and sparks between his teeth when he smiles, predator-grim. He knows there is still sometimes obsidian at the base of his throat, cracking into dangerous shards, cascading like shrapnel from his tongue-- but this is Stone tempered by Fire, so it belongs to the red god, as Seneca does.

Once, as the sun is sinking red, he snaps at a slave-priestess-- with his voice first, with his teeth a moment later-- and she stumbles back into a fire, and it catches on her dress, blooms up her body too quickly to stop, and she _burns_. The men around him laugh, wild as jackals, and Seneca bares his teeth at them until they stutter to an uneasy silence. With viper-quick fingers, he reaches into the fire and drags out the flame-red ashes, quick against his throat, a wordless prayer of offering humming in the back of his mouth.

They whisper about him, after that-- dangerous, feral, _tribal_. It was one thing to scare some stupid woman into the fire; it was another thing to do it with _reverence_ , with strange and holy light in his eyes, with fire on his fingertips. It doesn't matter. They all serve the red god.

When he tells them this, they whip him for insolence.

"You serve Caesar!" they tell him.

"Yes," he says, and smiles like a wild thing. "For the red god."

He smiles through every stroke, and those who watch it buzz around him, trapped somewhere between anxiety and respect. At the end, on his knees, he snatches the lash before they can flick the blood away, slicks his hand with it and drags it down his throat, smiling, smiling, while the centurion's face twists through anger into disgust into dawning, horrified realization.

"True to Caesar," Seneca hisses through his teeth, in a voice that knows what Fire tastes like. "True to Mars."

They don't whip him, after that.

(This is what the voice of the red god carries-- danger and sacrifice.)

* * *

"Do you need to be reminded of your place?" the Malpais Legate asks him, after. His face is grim-blank, and Seneca studies him with interest, reading the little tics of his eyes flicking across Seneca's face, the way his jaw tightens with silence.

"I am Roman," Seneca says, and smiles. The Malpais Legate is not afraid of his smile. "Do I?"

The Malpais Legate does not speak to him for the rest of the night. Blood cools and scabs along Seneca's spine, _red_ mellowed by time into rusty earth, into the clay of flesh. They watch the fire burn down into cinder together, and Seneca snatches glowing coals with his fingers, flicking them into the night, scattering curious coyotes who wander too close.

* * *

By the time he is grown, Seneca has used his hands to slice, and crush, and burn, and maim, and kill. He has peeled skin away from the red muscle beneath it with his fingernails and fire-bright determination and swallowed the screaming to feed his god. He has hammered nails into clammy flesh and raised the crosses.

In the arena, everything is simple-- nothing here is human except him, and everything wants to kill him, and his only responsibility is not to let it. It is a good place to learn the red god's hands. To find himself, by chance, in the right place to grab at an arm and _twist_ , pull back, put his foot on the spine to stop the other creature from rising, pull _harder_ , a low growl of escalating frustration in his throat, a high keening misery in the other creature's--

"Enough," snaps a voice, and Seneca pulls again, "I said enough!"

Seneca wants to eat both of them. This, he thinks dimly, is a red god want. 

He lets go.

The legionary's presence brings complicated reality dripping back into his vision, and the other creature is another slave-trainee, and Seneca has dislocated his arm. He thinks, with some satisfaction, that given enough time and possibly some more leverage he could have ripped the arm _off_. Spray of blood everywhere. Red meat dripping into the dust. That, he thinks, would have sated the red god.

The legionary instructor kicks the other boy for weakness and failure and cuffs Seneca around the head for being slow to obey. Seneca watches him pace and lecture through lowered lashes and thinks about how hard he would have to bite to crush his trachea. He considers it, during the run that follows. During the meal that night he picks through his bowl looking for bones to test his teeth on.

Much later, when he is grown and almost a legionary himself, he will face the instructor in the arena, and _smile_ as red washes up to make things simple.

The other creature chokes blood through a whistling breath, and Seneca circles it like a coyote, licking blood off his teeth, and laughs. The sound twists up into the sky like sacred smoke, like offerings.

(This is what the hands of the red god shape-- death and hunger.)

* * *

"You are not a dog," the Malpais Legate snaps. Seneca stands still in a corner and licks his teeth contemplatively, only his eyes tracking the Malpais Legate's irritated pacing across the tent, in tight circles around a desk stacked high with books written in dead tongues, maps of strange territory scribbled by frumentarii, the square black sprawl of a half-assembled handgun. "Stop acting like one."

Seneca blinks, slowly, until the Malpais Legate stands still long enough to glare at him, and then lets what he knows is _red_ creep into his own expression, sink into the angle of his smile. There is still blood in his teeth. The Malpais Legate is not afraid of him.

"I am Roman," he says, because it's still true. "All men have teeth. More should use them."

The Malpais Legate makes a _noise_. It makes the part of Seneca that is mostly red want to roll over and offer its throat, not because it _couldn't_ eat the Legate, but because there are things it would _rather_ do. He slides into a less menacing smile, instead. Licks his teeth, tastes residual copper.

"Tell me you aren't a cannibal," the Malpais Legate says, slouching into a chair with his head in one hand, and just sounds tired, and not like he expects to get the answer he wants.

Seneca pauses, lets the seconds tick towards a minute, partly just to watch the tension build in the Malpais Legate's shoulders.

"I am not a cannibal," he says mildly. "But our god is hungry."

The Malpais Legate throws a book at him. Seneca laughs, bright as candle-flame, and keeps it trapped in his mouth. This is not an offering. This is _his_.

* * *

The Legion has many hounds, half-tame, but Seneca is not the only outlier in the army. He is, perhaps, the only one who is not also a frumentarius, who has chosen instead to cleave to his little pack and rise no higher than decanus, who has indicated no ambition beyond commanding his tiny piece of the Legion and obeying his own glorious commander. This is probably why his wilder red kin always forget that he is one of them, why they look at him and think _dog_ instead of _coyote_ , why they turn their backs to him as though he would never bite them. For spies and strategists, the frumentarii are not so keen-eyed when they study their own pack.

It is their fortune that Seneca finds this more amusing than irritating.

Which does not mean that he won’t take advantage of their carelessness.

They can consider it… _instruction_.

Seneca has watched Vulpes Inculta’s ascension through the ranks, for example, with some interest-- this sharp-eyed little creature, a little younger than himself, slinking between the tents at night, disdainful and detached-- and though Seneca practices many virtues in the service of his red god, aloofness is not and never has been one of them.

Today he wants to _play_ , and as the Malpais Legate is occupied with higher things, someone else will have to be his accomplice. Normally he might bring his contubernium, but if he picks one out of the pack the rest will get restless, and he does not need _all of them_ for this. No, better that he brings someone like himself. Less obedient, but more inventive. He does not think that the fox will be easily lured away from his work, though, so perhaps a little _encouragement_ will be needed first.

Vulpes is isolated from the camp-- he usually is, which makes him a very enticing target in general; if Seneca decides to keep him, he will need to make it clear that the fox is not to be disturbed-- so it is no trouble at all to steal away from his contubernium and pick his way carefully behind the frumentarius. It is, in fact, _alarmingly_ easy to creep close enough to kill him.

Which Seneca is not planning to do. But that it would be so trivial is a concern.

Instead, he surges forward, crowding Vulpes against the closest wall, and wraps his forearm around the man’s throat, pulling tight before he can do more than take a single startled breath, any shout that he might have made choked quickly into silence. To his credit, his first impulse is to go for his knife, but Seneca still has a whole arm free to capture Vulpes’ wrist, pulling it away from his body and twisting, warningly. Vulpes does not heed the implied threat, writhing like a trapped eel and trying-- with desperate but calculated intensity-- to claw his fingers between Seneca’s forearm and his own throat. Seneca is forced to loosen his grip on Vulpes’ arm slightly or risk breaking the fox’s wrist, which would not really be in the spirit of the thing, but Vulpes just takes this as an incentive to struggle harder. Seneca bites the back of his neck, pleased, and applies a little more pressure to his throat, cutting off his breath until it is nothing but a thin, reedy wheeze.

“Show me your throat, little fox,” Seneca purrs, laughing through his teeth when Vulpes arches like a furious cat, fingernails drawing delicate lines of blood on Seneca’s forearm.

After only a few more moments of dramatically reduced oxygen, Vulpes falls obediently, shiveringly still, though Seneca has no doubt it is mostly adrenaline and anger, not fear, that has his curled fingers trembling against Seneca’s wrist. He hums, pressing the side of his jaw against the curve of Vulpes’ throat consideringly. Vulpes _hisses_ at him, thin and furious, which is adorable. Seneca lets him breathe a little more as a reward, and the fox proves his much-mentioned intelligence by inhaling carefully and making no attempt to renew his struggle.

“I need,” Seneca says slowly, “A _playmate_.”

Vulpes freezes, careful breath catching in his ribs, fingers twitching, tightening on Seneca’s wrist. Seneca grins into the side of his neck, amused. “How would you like to help me hunt some Rangers?”

There is a minute hesitation in Vulpes-- Seneca would have missed it entirely, he thinks, if he wasn’t pressed so close to him-- before he nods very slightly. Seneca bites his jaw lightly, to discourage any reckless tomfoolery, before he releases the fox and presses off the wall. Seneca dances back a few steps while he’s at it, in case Vulpes is of a mind to press his luck and keep play-fighting despite Seneca’s _very clear_ victory. But Vulpes just takes a measured breath and turns to glare at him, mouth pressed into a thin line, deeply unimpressed. Seneca eyes the blooming bruise on his throat and licks his teeth apologetically. He hadn’t realized the fox was quite so _delicate_ \-- he will have to be more careful with him in the future.

“Do you actually listen to yourself when you talk?” Vulpes demands, his voice a little strained, narrowed eyes flicking between Seneca’s teeth and his eyes.

Seneca blinks, head canting to one side slightly. “Yes?”

Vulpes makes a disgusted noise, rolling his eyes and baring his teeth briefly. But he edges around Seneca, keeping his eyes on him, and snatches a map to begin irritably plotting routes. What a good fox.

Even if they don’t find any Rangers, Seneca thinks this will be a _very good_ game.

* * *

The Malpais Legate is not inclined to faith or its questions when the sun is out, spilling wavering heat over the sand. He is not inclined to _humanity_ when the sun is out. But sometimes, in the safety of the dark, with his head thrown back to expose his throat and his eyes scanning the blank canvas above him as if he might chart strange stars there, something will bubble up in him to overflowing. In those moments, he will open his mouth and heresies will fall out.

Seneca, if he is quick and careful, can drink them like spring water spilling out of dusty stone.

“--dozens of gods, and Mars wasn’t even the first of them, just the one that was _useful_ ,” he mutters, fingers drumming restlessly, “Tribal, pagan simplicity, chopping up life into caricatures, unable to fathom a concept unless it had a face--”

Seneca does not think the red god _does_ have a face. But he no longer thinks the red god is _Mars_ , precisely, either.

“--not as if humans need excuses to kill each other, case in _point_ \--” he snarls, and whips one hand through the air to indicate something. Everything, probably. Seneca captures his hand before it can be retrieved and studies the Legate’s fingers, nicked and ink-stained.

“Stop,” the Malpais Legate mutters, but he doesn’t pull his hand back. Not hard enough to reclaim it, anyway.

“Ours did not have a face,” Seneca offers instead.

The Malpais Legate pauses, and when Seneca glances down at his face there is something tired in it, and his eyes are closed.

“Mine does,” he says.

* * *

“There is nothing in that canyon but angry insects,” Seneca says, and tilts one eyebrow up as Vulpes flinches forward into the table, hissing.

“ _Stop that_ ,” he snaps, whirling to shove Seneca further away. Seneca stands still long enough for Vulpes’ jaw to tighten, smiles tolerantly, and allows himself to be moved.

“Pay more attention,” he suggests, shrugging, and steps around his fox to hike himself up on the table instead, crossing his ankles and bracing the heels of his hands on the edge, still angled persistently into Vulpes’ personal space. The look he gets in exchange is _breathtakingly_ scathing. “I tell you-- bugs. Legs, chitin, probably poison. It is not worth your time.”

Vulpes does not _actually_ roll his eyes, but Seneca is reasonably sure he wants to. “Yet it is required. As _you_ , no doubt, have work to do.”

He does, but it is not urgent. Harassing Vulpes Inculta is always more interesting.

“It is pointless to waste frumentarii on ants and bloatflies,” he says, irritation beginning creep up on him. He wipes it away with an inviting smile. “We will hunt soon. You should follow.”

“Unlike you,” Vulpes sneers, “I do not have a commander who will indefinitely ignore my transgressions, so _no_ , I should _not_.”

Seneca blinks at him, slowly, considering. Vulpes loses patience with this almost immediately and tries to shove him off the table, but succeeds only in making him sway slightly and snarls under his breath.

It _is_ a waste, unless there is something hidden among the insects that Seneca had overlooked. He doubts it. Even if that were the case it would still be a job for trainees, perhaps a punishment detail for some contubernium that underperformed recently.

This is not the first time that Caesar’s orders have followed some logic only he sees. But it is the first time that Seneca is _annoyed_ by it. He clicks his fingernails on the edge of the table, watching Vulpes’ profile as he settles in to pretending that Seneca isn’t bothering him, the tension and anxiety in his shoulders and spine, the bite of his jaw. He has made his own complaints and had them ignored, Seneca suspects.

“Hm,” he says, and drops off the table, stretching until his spine cracks and Vulpes goes rigid rather than flinch.

“I will ask the Malpais Legate,” he says, flicking an amused glance at Vulpes when he swallows some kind of protest, “So you should not go until I tell you. There are puppies who could do this.”

“My duties are not actually your responsibility,” Vulpes tells the table, scowling.

“Of course they are,” says Seneca, leaving him behind. The Legate will be somewhere in the camp, and no one will hesitate to tell Seneca where precisely he is. “You are mine.”

He does not turn to look at whatever expression matches the strangled noise Vulpes produces. He can imagine it.

“ _Semper fidelis,_ ” he says over his shoulder, and does not think he imagines the huff of a laugh that follows.

* * *

There is no time when they are not at war. They are a Legion. War is what they are for. When they are not at war, they will stop being a Legion. Seneca is not sure what they will be then.

(Rome. They will be Rome.)

But there are moments when they are _more_ at war, and this is one of them: Seneca skirts the edge of the low cliff, creeping low on his fingertips and toes, a machete strapped to his armor, and his feathered helm set aside for the moment. It is not as if his men need to be reminded, and the outline is distinctive enough to draw the eye even on a night with so little moon. In the valley beneath him, NCR soldiers cluster around fires built in trash cans to throw back the liquid darkness.

One of Seneca’s marksmen is huddled just beside a boulder; he has been there, still as stone, for so many hours that the men below will think his shadow nothing more than part of the cliffside. His rifle has no scope, so there is no glint to give him away as he peers down the sights, tracking. He scarcely needs one at this distance, with his targets illuminated against the night. Seneca presses against the man’s back to reduce their profile against the stone.

“ _Refero,_ ” Seneca says, a voiceless, half-humming breath.

“ _Altus-valorem trium peltas,_ ” the man whispers, and gestures shortly with two fingers at each one. 

Seneca scrutinizes the site below them for a moment, watching the soldiers settle into their positions. They are such soft, light-craving, unwary creatures. There is no hint of anxiety in them, no evidence that they sense the danger creeping up on them from every side. One of them laughs.

“ _Occidere eos,_ ” he says, vaults over his soldier and skids down the slope of the cliff as the first shot rings out and one man’s head cracks open.

Seneca brings his momentum with him into the first slice of his machete into a soldier’s unprotected skull; it splits open easily, spilling its contents to the desert. Another shot, and the second of the valuable targets staggers, collapses-- there is blood pooling beneath his back. By now, the rest know that they are in danger, scrabble for discarded armor, for weapons laid aside, but it is much, _much_ too late.

The men of Seneca’s contubernium, restless after hours of waiting for blood, throw one volley of spears into the fray and then spill in from the night in waves, first silent, then _howling_. The NCR soldiers make one feeble attempt to form up, but the contubernium scatters them, pulls them down one at a time and hacks them apart.

One of the NCR soldiers fires a pistol directly into a legionary’s face and leaps up onto a table, shouting orders to men who cannot hope to obey him, if they are even alive to hear. There is a third shot from the cliff, and the final target of any meaning collapses, blood spitting from his throat, gagging as he presses desperate fingers to his wound. His will be a slower death, but it will be death regardless. Seneca smiles down into the face of a terrified man who has managed to retrieve a bayonet, but not the rifle it belongs to.

“I surrender!” the man shouts and drops his only weapon to raise his hands.

“ _Non est pax vobis Romae,_ ” Seneca laughs.

It echoes in eerie layers as his contubernium, finished with their work and eager for his approval, for his eyes on their bloody hands, form up in rings around him and his prey, circling, showing their teeth, blood-spattered, _his_. The dusty red light of the fires casts their weaving shadows into long, sinister shapes stretching into the red-black night desert. The man’s eyes dart frantically between them, fear-wild. 

“ _Vos tantum adepto lupos._ ”

* * *

“You should really be leaving survivors,” the Malpais Legate muses, eyeing the pile of heads that Seneca’s contubernium has piled up in the center of their camp, in as neat a pyramid as is possible with such gore-slick trophies.

Seneca can feel his face twisting up in confused distaste, and has it confirmed when the Malpais Legate laughs at him. “It damages morale when someone comes crawling back, broken, whining about atrocities,” the Legate explains, gesturing vaguely into the distance.

“A dozen headless corpses does not damage morale?” Seneca demands, irritated, nudging a head with his boot to press it more firmly into place. The pyramid wobbles slightly but doesn’t collapse. His men do good work, even when they are being whimsical with their scant recreational time.

The Malpais Legate does not shrug, at least in public, but Seneca recognizes the way his mouth quirks. “Profligates are optimistic by nature.”

Seneca scowls. “Profligates are _idiots_.”

“Those are not mutually exclusive qualities.”

* * *

Vulpes has gotten _much_ harder to sneak up on since the first time Seneca cornered him, which Seneca feels rather smug about. He is an _excellent_ mentor. Perhaps, when he is old and not so useful on the battlefield, he will find new purpose as an instructor, whipping new puppies into hunting hounds.

It does mean that Vulpes doesn’t even flinch when Seneca drops down from the hole in the roof above him, landing cat-careful on his toes and fingertips in the badly-lit half-destroyed room that Vulpes has commandeered, which is a slight disappointment. The fox just glances sideways at him, frowning, and sighs. Seneca sprawls himself against Vulpes’ side to lean his head over whatever paperwork has captured the frumentarius’ attention, patiently ignoring the way Vulpes goes rigid before forcing himself to relax in slow, cautious increments.

“Supply lines?” Seneca asks quietly, tracing one with a finger. Vulpes bats his hand away and Seneca grins down at him, delighted.

“Go away,” Vulpes hisses, trying to shrug him off. “This is not your business. What are you even doing here?”

Seneca drapes himself pointedly across Vulpes’ shoulders, leaning in and forcing him to hunch down over his makeshift desk. He resists only slightly, apparently unwilling to go the inconvenience of really fighting Seneca off of him, though Seneca could probably be drawn into a play-fight if Vulpes was so inclined. It would be something to do, anyway. When Vulpes huffs, going satisfyingly limp instead of struggling and thus surrendering any more futile attempts to dislodge him, Seneca hums against his temple approvingly, pulling his weight off the fragile frumentarius and bracing himself with one hand on the back of Vulpes’ chair. He swipes his other hand over Vulpes’ scalp reassuringly-- no hard feelings-- then pulls the papers closer to himself. Vulpes lets him get away with it this time, straightening and showing Seneca his teeth to indicate his displeasure. 

Seneca knows enough about him to recognize that Vulpes is not half as feral as Seneca himself is, that this is his attempt to match himself to a language that Seneca will read better, and he finds the attempt, and the implications, faintly amusing. But he supposes that Vulpes does not watch Seneca interact with other soldiers, has not seen him slide into the skin of a man with only his teeth still exposed, obscure his wilder instincts into shapes that men find more comfortable. Vulpes does not spend much time with other soldiers at all. Even when he was a decanus, he did not bond with his contubernium as Seneca has with his own.

A coyote can find a place among hounds. It must be harder, for a fox.

“I am bored and irritated, and somewhere there are strangers to kill,” Seneca confesses, dropping his chin onto Vulpes’ shoulder as he thumbs through maps curiously. “You know things.”

Vulpes is silent for a long moment, watching Seneca sideways through his eyelashes. Finally, sighing as though Seneca is the most troublesome thing in his life, he says, “You are a menace.”

But he pulls one page out of the stack and smacks it gently against Seneca’s face. Seneca takes it from him before he can get more creative.

“This is why you are my favourite,” Seneca tells him seriously, and magnanimously ignores the expression of startled gratification that flits across Vulpes’ face.

* * *

“Oh god, oh fuck, oh god, oh fuck--” whimpers the half-trained profligate whelp that Seneca drags out of a wrecked NCR tent and drops in a pile of eviscerated soldiers.

The contubernium is occupied with dragging corpses out of the pile and nailing them to the ground at precisely measured distances along the side of the road, but their heads tilt back, attracted to the sound of still-squirming prey. Seneca hisses at them through his teeth, and they bend back to their work, reluctant but obedient. The newest soldier-- a replacement for the one he lost in their last engagement-- makes to turn his head, but one of the others cuffs him sharply and there is a short, muttered conversation which Seneca graciously ignores.

Seneca crouches on his heels over the pathetic, shivering profligate and considers him. Half-grown, _barely_ trained, no weapon anywhere on his person, all gangly limbs and not so much as a drop of malice or danger in him. Seneca had been more dangerous at half his size, and that was _before_ he was Roman, when he had still been a priest and _shouldn’t_ have been dangerous. Seneca’s old instructor would have had this child nailed to a cross as an incentive to the rest of them years ago.

This is what the NCR sent out into the east to meet the Legion.

_This_.

“Speak,” Seneca tells him, prodding lightly at the boy’s shoulder with a machete.

The profligate squeaks, and then babbles incoherently, miserably, begging not to be killed. Seneca resists the urge to roll his eyes, but only because he supposes terrified pleading is the correct response, _technically_.

“Your commanders, you know where they are?” he asks, because it’s entirely possible, given the caliber of material he is working with, that the profligate _doesn’t_ know.

“Camp McCarran! And Mojave Outpost!”

“I do not care,” Seneca says, waving the machete vaguely while the profligate flinches. That is the business of frumentarii, and Seneca has no doubt that they already know much more than this helpless puppy. If he cared, he would just badger Vulpes. “You can find them. Answer.”

“Yes! Yes, yes, I can find them, I can show--”

“Go then,” Seneca cuts him off, already bored. The inefficiency of the thing irritates him, but if this is what the Malpais Legate wants Seneca will give it to him. “Tell them what you see here. There will be no trespass in Caesar’s land.”

The boy scrambles immediately to his feet and takes off west at a dead run. Seneca _does_ roll his eyes this time, standing. The idiot will exhaust himself well before he leaves Legion territory. He will need to be slowed. Seneca clicks his fingers impatiently at the nearest sharpshooter, who flashes him a playful grin and raises his rifle.

“And all will be Caesar’s land soon,” Seneca calls after the profligate, the edge of coyote-wild laughter sharpening his voice, as the rifle reports.

* * *

_Auribus teneo lupum,_ says the Malpais Legate, to the coyote among his hounds.

_Semper fidelis,_ the coyote says, grinning, teeth in a throat.

* * *

It is not unusual for the frumentarii to vanish for long stretches of time. They do important and mysterious work for Caesar that is, frankly, not of much immediate interest to Seneca until and unless it results in information that he can use to lead his contubernium on a hunt. So it is not alarming when he goes to harass Vulpes to amuse himself, only to find the fox missing from his usual post.

It is not alarming the second day, or the third, or even the tenth.

It is not until Vulpes has been gone for two full weeks that the Malpais Legate, finally tired of Seneca sulking in his tent at all hours, demands, “Why are you not off doing whatever it is you _usually_ do between patrols.”

Seneca doesn’t look away from the knife he’s been tossing and catching for the last fifteen minutes. Partly this is because if he does he’ll probably miss it and impale himself; partly this is to annoy the Malpais Legate, because Seneca takes his joy where he can find it. “He is not here. I cannot do him if I cannot find him.”

He can _feel_ the Malpais Legate’s eyebrows raising, and suppresses a smirk. “Rephrase that,” the Malpais Legate suggests, probably intending to sound foreboding, but to Seneca he just sounds tired and amused, as usual.

“Vulpes Inculta has wandered off so I cannot play with him?” he offers, flashing his teeth.

“Vulpes Inculta is dead,” the Malpais Legate says flatly, and then swears in a language Seneca doesn’t know well enough to translate when he misses the knife and it slams blade-first into the desk, missing Seneca’s faltering fingers by fractions of an inch.

_”Rephrase that,”_ Seneca hisses, staring at his commander’s startled face, and watches it twitch down into the familiar flat lines that the Malpais Legate’s face always falls into when he going to tell Seneca something he does not want to hear. When he is not certain that he is going to be able to put the pieces back together.

Seneca doesn’t wait to hear it. He is already storming out of the tent before the first syllable has hit the air.

* * *

Vulpes Inculta is not dead.

“I can walk,” Vulpes says against Seneca’s collarbone, resigned, but he’s mumbling, halfway to unconscious, which Seneca feels somewhat undercuts his argument.

“Let me,” he says, instead of arguing, and feels Vulpes sigh, hiding his face against Seneca’s neck in surrender. 

It is unlike him to give up so easily-- half the fun of playing with him is seeing how far he has to push to make Vulpes buckle-- and red creeps into Seneca’s vision.

He should have been more thorough in his dismantling of Vulpes’ jailers. But it would have delayed him, and he doesn’t want to consider how much more Vulpes would have bled before Seneca found him. Does not want to consider _Vulpes Inculta is dead_ , and burning a pale corpse in the desert, surrendering him to the red god and memory.

He will go back later, perhaps, and arrange an appropriately threatening display of dismembered limbs. Express his displeasure. Establish the very real threat that he will _continue_ to express his displeasure, with escalating creativity, if the idiot tribals responsible do not stay away from what belongs to him. When Vulpes goes to them again-- because he will; Seneca is not fool enough to think that this will change the mandate to recruit the tribe, or that Vulpes will shy away from it simply because it hurt him once-- they will _understand_ that he is to be left untouched if they do not want Seneca to raze their pathetic tribe, and all its allies, into _ash_.

Somewhere in the distance, a coyote keeps pace with Seneca’s strides and waits to see if there is carrion to scavenge.

* * *

Seneca is ordered to swing wide around the Dam and pick off snipers and stragglers as his commander takes this stronghold for the Legion. It is not a surprising command. Seneca’s contubernium has shown a predilection for this kind of work-- for the creeping, skulking hunt, for the ambush, for winnowing out the weakest link and thereby snapping the chain-- and it would be a waste to throw them into the cauldron of mass combat, packed in shoulder-to-shoulder in narrow Old World hallways.

There is a red thing in Seneca that aches at being separated from the Malpais Legate during this critical battle, regardless of the good tactical sense of the order.

“Give them to Vulpes, then, he was a decanus once,” he wheedles, his chin propped on the Legate’s shoulder, glaring dully at the papers spread across the desk.

The Malpais Legate makes a scoffing sound that Seneca normally finds very amusing. “You know as well as I do that your little wolf pack will not obey anyone but you. I should have rotated soldiers through your contubernium instead of letting you keep any. You have too much pull on their hearts.”

“They are good legionaries. Loyal,” Seneca agrees. “They would obey another if I told them to. They know Vulpes.”

“They are wild animals leashed to you by some witchcraft,” the Malpais Legate grumbles, pulling a book away from Seneca’s searching fingers and snapping it closed. “Stop arguing before I remember that they should only be loyal to Caesar.”

Seneca has never been very good at only being loyal to Caesar.

He does not see how anyone could be, with the Malpais Legate standing so near.

* * *

They should never have tried to bring the red god to a water place.

Water eats fire.

* * *

In the Legion, all mistakes are fatal.

The Malpais Legate is coated in pitch, and set alight, and thrown from the heights. Seneca watches with the rest of the slave-soldiers, a stone-still decanus at the head of his restless contubernium, visible, _watched_ , grateful that there is enough fire in his spirit now to keep his eyes dry and empty. In the part of him that is still eight years old he wonders if the Stone will take in a Roman-- if there will be that certainty and compassion waiting for him. He wonders if he wants it to.

(In the part of him that belongs to the red god, he looks at his burning commander, and thinks _red_ ; looks at Caesar, and thinks _eat_ ; holds these impulses in his mind and weighs them for a long, long time.

He knows, by now, that the red god only wants to eat prey. _True to Caesar_ , he thinks, _for now_.)

When his commander falls, there is no one left but Seneca who will know the words; so when he whispers, "Yinildzil," to the falling flame there is no one who knows it for a prayer and command. And when he laughs, coyote-wild and smoke-voiced, most of the centuria laughs nervously alongside, because none of them know how to listen.

(His contubernium, who know him, stare forward dead-faced and lick their teeth. Later, in the dark, they howl.)

* * *

He isn't properly dead, the slave-servants say. He walks over the sand and leaves no trace, red and black, still on fire, like a bleeding ghost. He's in the desert somewhere, building an army out of bones and pitch. That isn't the wind you hear.

The first time Seneca hears one of these stories, he drags the offending mouth and the man attached to it to the arena and pits him against three half-trained starving mongrels. The showing the slave-servant gives is not impressive. Seneca does not smile, and that more than anything seems to unnerve his contubernium.

None of his legionaries tell these stories, and they silence the others in their centuria, who belong to other decani, with snarls and grim stares whenever talk heads in that direction. But the stories spread, somehow, and it is less than two weeks before he hears them in the mouth of a new legionary at the mess.

"Do you think the Burned Man will cross the river?" the legionary asks his meal companion, who is stubbornly and silently shovelling porridge into his mouth, perhaps because he has noticed Seneca's arrival and the covert silencing gestures of his contubernium.

Seneca slams the legionary's face into his bowl and holds him there through the first panicked struggle, until training kicks in and he goes prey-still, waiting helpless for orders. There is a tiny hesitation in the normal noise of mess, and then everyone collectively decides to pretend that nothing is happening. Seneca is a decanus. If he wants to discipline a legionary, he will.

"You will be silent," Seneca says, whisper-soft into his ear. "On the subject of the Malpais Legate."

He waits patiently for the legionary to nod into his bowl of splattered porridge, digging his fingernails into the man's scalp. And then he waits a little longer, until spasmodic panic returns to the legionary's limbs as his lungs seize, before he releases the man and stalks out of the mess.

His contubernium follows him at a distance, restless, angry. For want of an enemy to fight, they bite irritably at each other, and snarl at anyone outside their own unit. At night, they form a tight circle around Seneca, sharpening knives, biting their tongues.

* * *

The next week, it becomes a crime to say his name.

* * *

“You have to stop,” Vulpes hisses, all agitation and raised hackles, “Before someone finds enough of a reason to put you on a cross.”

Seneca smiles with all his teeth, inviting. At his back, he hears the contubernium go predator-still, and watches Vulpes’ eyes flick between them. The frustrated edge of violence in the angle of his shoulders, in his fingers, wipes smoothly away as if it was never there, replaced by studied indifference. In the back of his mind, Seneca is almost pleased. Cannier all the time, his fox.

“There are easier ways to commit suicide,” Vulpes says, bland and cool.

“ _Semper fidelis_ ,” Seneca snarls, thin, between his teeth.

Something flinches behind Vulpes’ eyes, but all he says, bite filtering back into his voice as he retreats, is “ _Fine._ ”

* * *

The new Legate wears a mask.

Seneca wants to tear his throat out.

He imagines the face beneath it paling as blood pools at his feet.

* * *

The worst part, the truly _terrible_ thing, is that Seneca almost wishes it was true. A ghost would be something.

A ghost would be _something_.

* * *

_Semper fidelis,_ the coyote howls into the silence.

* * *

With the Malpais Legate's absence, he is less tame than before, a barely-leashed thing of bright teeth and thin temper. But Seneca is a good soldier despite himself. He follows the orders he is given, without question or prevarication, and so he is liked by most of his peers and superiors, even if they give him a wider distance than they once would have. Now and again, when he does well, he is even rewarded-- and on those days he smiles until strangers retreat from him, and thinks red thoughts, thinks _eat_ and watches the shadows through the walls of Caesar's tent. He speaks to no one outside of his contubernium and the centurions who give him his orders.

Sometimes Vulpes follows him through camp like a shadow, mouth thin, and stares silent threat at anyone who looks at Seneca like they might speak to him. This is as close to an apology as either of them will get.

He is a Roman, a legionary, a decanus on the path to centurion, and someday he will satisfy his god. It is close to having a tribe. It is the closest thing he can have. It is a place, and a god, and a purpose.

It is not enough.

( _Auribus teneo lupum,_ the ghost whispers while he sleeps.)

* * *

They are skirmishing in the Mojave, again, when he dies. An NCR bullet punches into his ribcage-- _red_ , he thinks-- and he stumbles, breath stolen. There is a jut of stone that has taken just right the shape to knock him out as he falls.

(Sometimes, later, he will think on this. On stone and Stone.)

It is hours later that he wakes, his mind grainy and unfocused, to find that he must have been taken for dead. All of his contubernium are laid out around him, a ring of corpses where they must have tried to rally around him when he fell. Not all of the centuria are fallen, but there are enough corpses-- legionaries and troopers both-- that he can guess at an eventual retreat on both sides. He finds a piece of brittle flint to dig the bullet out of his ribs, and bandages in a fallen ranger's pack to discourage any further bleeding, but by then night has fallen, and he knows-- with the kind of red calm that came to him in the arena-- that he can't go back to camp. Someone will have to take the blame for this disaster, and he will be the most convenient corpse.

He has been under scrutiny since the Malpais Legate's death. Caesar will know, because once he spoke with the Malpais Legate like a brother, that it was only that Seneca had a dead tongue trapped in his throat, and a particular (red) tenacity. This had captured the Malpais Legate's attention long enough for proprietary interest to grow in the same place, enough that he was kept close, proving his place with broken bones and snarled threats as necessary. He was favoured, in a way; a challenge, in another.

A wolf held by the ears. A red-mouthed coyote slinking between shadows.

But Seneca is aware that the centurions and the other decani are mostly of the opinion that they were fucking (an impulse to bare his throat; _true to the Burned Man_ , he thinks, and it's a little hysterical even in his own mind) and the rank-and-file legionaries thought they were doing something indescribable but somehow _worse_ than fucking. Even his own contubernium, too loyal to comment, had been full of sly smiles and barking laughter if Seneca returned to the tent late for any reason; and their grim, over-protective silence in the days since the Legate’s fall has not gone unnoticed. Seneca has let this wash away in the wild, red calm of war, but he knows that it's there in the mutters and sideways glances. He has let this continue too long because grief chokes his frustration, and because he is not sure that they are wrong.

Faceless gods and ink-stained fingers.

Loyal as any hound, for all the wildness in him.

All mistakes are fatal.

He wonders what they will tell Vulpes about what happened here.

He leaves most of his uniform behind-- scavenges the least objectionable and blood-spattered parts of the troopers' gear, and later will replace parts of the armor with that of raiders he kills along the road. (He catches himself smiling feral into a raider's face as she dies, brittle flint broken into her lungs, and shakes away the red thoughts.) He takes the feathers from his decanus helmet, and can't even explain it to himself, except that he earned them, and removed from their setting they are only feathers. No one will know what they are. _He_ will know, and he needs... something.

He leaves the troopers and most of the legionaries for coyotes and geckos to fight over and drags his contubernium into a shallow cliff-face cave. The task leaves him more breathless than he expects, and he waits for morning beside them, with his head tipped back against the cave wall, humming "Ghosts Live In Stone" and wordless red god prayers to their ghosts.

When dawn crests the horizon, he picks a direction and walks.

* * *

The doctor in the little one-farm NCR town he finds first congratulates him on getting most of the bullet out without killing himself and remarks disparagingly on the piss-poor marksmanship of raiders. Seneca does not choke on his own laughter, but it is a near thing. The doctor grips his shoulder bracingly and says something about adrenaline and hysteria. Seneca doesn't argue.

The farmer's wife runs a scavenger's shop out of their shed and asks where he's going, where he's from. He tells her what is more-or-less the truth: that his tribe was destroyed when he was young, that he was a slave for a time, that he was not going anywhere or from anywhere. She makes sympathetic noises, curses the Legion roundly, tells him he can stay until he gets his bearings. There's a loft in the barn-- he can sleep there if he'll help around the shop, and maybe go out to some of the sites her boys haven't combed over for products yet.

He doesn't have a better plan.

After a few weeks, a man comes around to the shop. Seneca is perched on his heels, organizing the assorted canned things into pleasing rows by contents and color (which is not, strictly speaking, something he has been asked to do; but it is keeping him occupied, and the farmer's wife seems to find it amusing) and the man looms over him for a long moment before asking him if he is any good with a gun. Seneca rises with slow, coiled grace, quells the red god thought fluttering at the edge of his mind and finally concedes that yes, he is familiar with the essentials. And does he know how to survive in the desert, the man asks. Yes, he does. And would he consider himself punctual and reliable? It has been remarked on.

Well, then, all that being the case, would he like to carry a package to the next town over-- s'bout a three-day walk-- in exchange for some clothes that actually fit him and a weapon that hasn't been picked off a raider's corpse?

And that is how Seneca becomes a courier.

* * *

He travels the Mojave in fits and bursts, town to town, carrying mail and packages and gossip. He knows how to avoid the Legion parties, still thin in this area after the Boulder City disaster. He collects weird little items along the way and keeps them in his own bag, and every few months he heads back towards the one-farm town with the scavenger's shop and delivers them to the farmer's wife.

"You oughta let me pay you for these," she says, but she smiles at him-- her smile is soft, toothless, and makes him nervous in a way he can't describe-- so he understands that she isn't really annoyed about it.

"Mothers should get gifts," he says, perched on her counter, looking down into her gentle, open face, because saying that is small enough, vague enough, that he won't have to explain it.

Once, she asks him what his name used to be. 

"Only there was this older fella in town a few weeks back, real bookish type, and he said 'Seneca' sounded like it were a Legion name, not a tribal one. So what was your name when you was little?"

He doesn't know, exactly, how to answer her. He has been Seneca for a long time, and Hataashki and Nihimaii died with the rest of his tribe. He doesn't know how to explain to her that he can't use those names anymore, that they don't belong to him, but he tries. She doesn't understand, but she likes him enough to be kind about it, and the next time he comes back with a handful of cheerful bric-a-brac for her, she offers him a new name: he can be Simon, if he wants, if he'd like that.

She had a son named Simon, once. She's told him about that child, who is buried on the cliff where he will always be the first to see the sun rise-- Simon, who the Legion stole from her. She is trying to redress the imbalance, to give a gift to a man she thinks has been stolen from as she has.

(And she isn't wrong. Caesar stole his family, and his land, and his god, and his commander, and his names.)

"Yes," he says, and swallows the 'Mother' on his tongue. "I would like that."

(But he, too, is a thief.)

* * *

Simon ranges-- visits places both familiar and strange, listens to the stories people tell in saloons and markets; he carries mail, picks through ruins, kills the occasional raider, saves the occasional life. Moments of red death in this place; moments of stone compassion in that one. 

He misses having gods. He misses his commander, and his contubernium, and his fox, and his tribe. But however far he goes, however empty his ribcage becomes, there is always this tether. There is always this landmark, in the distance, to orient himself around; there is always this person to be.

A one-farm town with a Mother who needed a son.

* * *

_Tu reliquisti me,_ the coyote says, hunting, haunting. _Reditum. Ego semper fidelis._

The desert says nothing.

_Et mortuus es ad me,_ the coyote snarls, and shatters into shards of black stone.

* * *

He explores, sometimes, when there’s nothing in his bag and the nearest Mojave Express has nothing to offer him. Sometimes he finds nothing of interest. _Most of the time_ he finds nothing of interest-- a trinket for the farmer’s wife at best, a nest of deathclaws at worst. Marks it on the courier maps when he drags himself back into civilization so that no one else has to waste their time.

6- nothing here.

6- raiders. cleared, but who knows.

6- trust me, just don’t.

6- cannibals. enjoy.

6- cave in the cliff. look up.

6- bring rad-x or go around.

Simon gradually becomes aware that the way some of the Mojave Express depots and their surrounding bars go silent when he arrives is because he has the 6 patched on his coat. (The farmer’s wife made the patch for him and sewed it on the sleeve, rambling on at her husband about Simon’s ‘accomplishments’ the whole time, proud as a Bighorner with a rambunctious calf. Simon had tried to project apology without actually saying anything, and the farmer had raised an eyebrow at his wife, shrugged at Simon, and handed him the mail on his way out.) A woman he only ever knows as Courier 3 slings an arm around his shoulders-- politely ignores the way he goes instinctively rigid and reaches for a knife-- and solemnly declares him the craziest motherfucker she has ever known.

Then she buys him a beer that he won’t drink and makes him explain how to climb up a cliff without a rope.

“You have hands,” he says blandly, and she laughs as if he’s made a joke.

* * *

Every once in a blue moon, Simon finds something that isn’t either a waste or a disaster.

They call it the Divide. They smile every time they see him, and the whole little community gathers in the middle of the settlement to give him mail to bring back to family, and make requests for water, seeds, medicine.

6- safe, small. bring trade.

* * *

He arrives at Fort Aradesh, with letters from distant sweethearts and a sealed NCR parcel from Fort Golf, two weeks after Caesar wipes it off the map.

Simon scouts the perimeter and picks through the wreckage, looking for survivors from the NCR or indications that the Legion is planning to keep the fort. He finds neither. It’s just a husk, now. Empty of purpose.

Legion must be expanding. _All will be Caesar’s land soon._

He takes as many name-tags as he can find and matches them to as many letters as he has. The brass at Golf can have a list when he brings their parcel back. The widows will get the tags.

6- fort ~~aradesh~~ abandon. avoid.

* * *

After a Fiend manages to break Simon’s arm with a sledgehammer that the scrawny little creature would never have been able to _lift_ without Psycho, Simon reluctantly runs the Big Circle for a few months. It’s as safe as anything is out here, deep in NCR territory, where they like to consider themselves civilized. Mostly trekking back and forth between New Reno and Vault City, mostly with caravans whether he wants their presence or not.

The cities are loud and disconcertingly bright and drive home the idea of _profligacy_ in a way that still makes Simon uncomfortable.

As soon as his fingers stop tingling, he veers back into wilder territory.

* * *

It’s rare that Simon encounters anyone between stops. He doesn’t walk the roads, or even the recognized trails, most of the time. He travels at night, leaves very little sign of his passing, and goes far out of his way if he hears strangers talking in his general vicinity. At least until he can have eyes on them for a few hours; at least until he’s reasonably confident that if he walks up to them they’ll just ask him to stand there while they write letters on whatever scraps of paper they can find in their pockets.

It’s rarer still that he encounters Legion parties this far west.

But it happens.

“Ave,” he says mildly, sharpening his vowels, to the recruit legionary glaring at him. Young enough that he was probably still in training when Seneca fell. He doesn’t see a deserter; just a profligate. One he isn’t even allowed to openly hate, much less touch-- the rules of Caesar’s army have not changed much in Seneca’s absence.

“True to Caesar,” the man’s superior interjects, strolling past and cuffing his suspicious subordinate casually as he goes.

“Sure,” says Simon, and keeps walking.

* * *

He likes visiting the tiny, growing community in the Divide; watching them build out new structures from the wreckage, plants crops, dowse for water. It blossoms under his attention like a desert flower, equally fragile and resilient. None of the residents call him Simon-- they all insist, with a kind of cheerful reverence, on calling him Six. 

Less than a year after he finds them and starts including them in his rounds, there is a sign up in the pass that reads: COME ON HOME, SIX! And then another, about half a mile further: LEFT THE LIGHT ON FOR YOU. 

He’s charmed. It’s awful.

It’s still there, almost two years later-- they’ve repainted it a dozen times-- and Simon ignores the way the NCR troopers straggling in and out of the Divide on resupply missions squint between him and the sign as they catch sight of the 6 patched on his coat. It isn’t their business. He doesn’t belong to the NCR no matter how much mail he carries for them, and neither does the Divide no matter how ardently the NCR wants it, and if the settlers want to be strange and sentimental that’s their prerogative. Simon suspects he couldn’t change their mind about it if he wanted to, at this point. He let it go on too long-- he always does.

“I don’t know how we’d have made it through the first six months if you hadn’t brought that caravan through,” says Elias, the nominal leader of the group, ignoring an NCR major who has been trying to get his attention for the past five minutes without actually interrupting. 

Simon has heard the other residents tease Elias about being the mayor, and he always hastily denies it, red creeping up his neck to settle in his ears, sheepish smile, waving hands. Everybody who wants something done in the Divide goes to him first, though. Even the NCR.

(The Legion won’t when it comes-- and it will-- and Simon isn’t sure what to do about it. For the first time in a _long_ time, he prays to the Stone. _Give shelter, give shelter; hide us from the dark._ Scratches his petitions into the passage walls, scrawls them on the high stone of the cliffs, scrapes them into the dust in the valley; all of it in a dead language, but it’s the only one he’s ever spoken to Stone in.

Standing Stone isn’t here, but the whole world is stone when you get down deep enough. He doesn’t know what else to do.

Somewhere in the distance, in his mind, a coyote laughs.)

“It is not a hard road,” Simon says, looking through his satchel, “Once you see it.”

Elias accepts the package-- the NCR’s bear stamped awkwardly over the Old World stripes and the ring of stars that the Divide has adopted as its own-- with an expression which says very clearly that he doubts this. Simon shrugs at him. A thing can be both true and untrue.

“All the same,” says Elias, terribly earnest, “You’re part of this, you know. You ever want to settle down, you come right on back and-- well, we’ll have a place ready for you.”

Simon cannot imagine what it would be like to have a home he stayed in. Some place with walls, and neighbors, and some occupation that did not include a gun. Elias looking at him, ignoring soldiers, as if Simon is worth his attention. It feels like stone, like a steady place to stand, and he isn’t sure if he remembers how to be that. He barely remembers how to pray that. Some of it must show on his face because Elias’s expression does something complicated-- empathy and regret and sadness and a little of something bittersweet and hopeful-- before he smiles.

“Anytime you’re ready, Six,” he says, and _means it_ the way Elias can mean things, sometimes, with every particle of his being.

Simon isn’t sure he remembers what it was like to _mean things_ , either.

* * *

A stranger shoots him, twice, in the head.

_Red_ , he thinks, and aches for the first time in years to sink his teeth into someone's throat.

* * *

When he wakes up, spat out of his well-deserved grave a second time, he is not Simon anymore. He knows this with the certainty of Stone, the way only priests are meant to know things. He grieves for the farmer's wife, who has had Simon stolen from her again; he grieves for Elias, waiting in the Divide for someone who will never come home again. But what can be done? 

Ghosts are what they are. 

He is what he is.

_Ego autem mortuus sum,_ he mouths to a cracked, yellow ceiling. 

(He does not know what that makes him. Not a priest, not a legionary, not a courier-- but there is work to be done. Surely, if there was not work to be done, Stone would not reject him. Not now. Not _still_.)

When this doctor asks his name, he listens-- in a way he has not listened since he was young, and Stone stood over him, and coyotes sang with him, when certainty was easy-- until the right sounds fall on his tongue and out of his mouth, slowly, like smooth river stones. 

Tsela. He will be Tsela, now, until the work is done.

If he is lucky, when the work is done, he will lie down and Stone will take him back.

(If he is not lucky, when the work is done, the red god will lead him to worship.)

* * *

The doctor asks where he comes from, where he's going-- this time, Tsela does not tell the truth. (His voice was not for deceit-- )

"I do not remember," he says, smoke and stone, and the doctor nods with no surprise.

"Well," the doctor says, "Could be you'll get some of it back with time. But could be you won't. Couple of bullets in the brainpan'll do that kind of thing. Got some of your personal articles-- hope you don't mind, I thought I might find a next-of-kin in it-- might give you some clue."

Tsela has no more kin, and he doesn't need the delivery ticket to remember the face of the man who fired two bullets into his skull and buried him in a shallow grave over a 2-inch piece of circular metal, but he accepts them, and all he says is, "I hope so."

* * *

Sometimes, in a stranger's face, he will see a flash of familiar teeth; in a stranger's voice, a familiar tone; in a stranger's hands, familiar fingers. The shadow of a sheltering stone. _Unleash me, Nihimaii._

He chokes on blessings.

"You okay, pal?" asks Sunny, two fingers on the top of Cheyenne's head between watchful guard-dog eyes.

But he cannot speak.

* * *

He covets the emptiness of the desert; the long silent roads, the dust familiar red, the distant shapes that might be men or gods but must be strangers all the same.

The desert is a good place to be alone. No tribe, no soldiers, no farmer's wife, no echoes of a Sister long dead. Only stone, and dust, and wind, and sun.

It will not last forever.

He wants to swallow it whole.

* * *

He sees the crucified first. Even after all this time, this many roads, two different names, his first thought is still, _Festum enim esurientem, sacrificium pro diis._

He sees Vulpes second. And his first thought is still, _Show me your throat, little fox_.

But he doesn’t say that.

He doesn’t say anything.

He lets Vulpes talk, keen eyes ticking over his face, back and forth, back and forth. He knows he’s missing something, that he should remember who Tsela is. But he doesn’t-- three years, the desert, his unsmiling mouth, a thin layer of weather-beaten plastic obscuring his eyes; it will be enough, must be enough-- and Tsela knows that it will _itch_ at the back of Vulpes’ skull for days, an aggravation that he won’t admit to except in the dark. Perhaps not even then.

The Legion hounds shrink away from Tsela, ears flat against their skulls, tails limp, pacing in wide circles. Something must still be red in his bearing. Vulpes’ mouth twists when he leaves, snaps his fingers to call the beasts tame-- or near enough-- to his heels.

It must be enough.

Vulpes would not recognize him and then let him go.

* * *

(But Vulpes was never very _Roman_ , was he?)

(Foxes are tricksters, after all.)

(Same as coyotes.)

* * *

Novac has grown in the shadow of a tyrant. There are two men in the dinosaur’s mouth, serving as the teeth of their community. Both of them wear the red berets of Seneca’s enemies-- but Tsela does not have enemies, except perhaps the man who shot him. He tucks his own teeth into his ribcage and smiles, brittle. 

“Have you seen a man in a checkered suit?”

“Well, there’s a question.”

* * *

One of them is warm and gregarious, hiding calculation behind a generous mouth curled up into a smile. _You’ll do what I want_ , he says with every angle, _or I will end your hunt here._ Tsela can feel his own hackles rising with every second he spends in the man’s company.

“How can I help?” bites Tsela, through a smile with too many teeth.

* * *

One of them is broken.

Tsela is not familiar with this area, but all the slaver parties under the Officiorum ab Famulatus work in the same way. That is part of the Legion’s power-- uniformity. All right societies, in the view of Caesar, have bureaucracy. This is a subject that Seneca and the Malpais Legate discussed, sometimes, by lamplight. Seneca would pick through paperwork, complaining in a liquid combination of Roman and his own dead language about the penmanship, the grammar, the tautological bullshit; the Malpais Legate would roll his eyes and bicker about documentation and write. Black ink, on paper tinted gold with oil light.

(He looks back on these memories, surprised to find no red in them. Warm light, and black ink, and the blue of the Legate’s eyes cutting to his; all his teeth mellowed by his commander, throat bared and content.)

He finds the bill of sale. It is not even particularly difficult.

(He is, after all, a thief.)

* * *

In the Legion, Seneca had never considered that there might be ghouls which were anything other than mindless scavengers, of no greater note than geckoes. And if he had, it would have made no difference-- all profligates were equally valueless.

Simon met a few on his rounds. They were people. Once, he returned to a particular house and the ghoul he had brought mail to three months before had tried to peel his face off with her fingernails. She said nothing; only shrieked, breathless and hollow, like an unquiet shade.

“See if you can get those ghouls out of there,” says the smooth-talker, tilting his head up towards the mountains.

Tsela goes into the REPCONN facility with a shotgun.

(He is, after all, a soldier.)

* * *

“I had a good feeling about you,” Manny Vargas lies, smooth smiling.

Tsela meets his gaze with his blankest stare, and swipes the toe of his boot in the dust, leaves a smear of unidentifiable gore. He needs to find a shotgun with an intact ejection port to scavenge. He needs to scrub sand into his hair to soak up any residual blood. He needs to not be looking at this man’s face any more.

“You look like you been through a lot.”

“About the man I am looking for,” says Tsela.

* * *

He brings Boone with him when he leaves.

“I thought snipers worked in teams,” he says, soft, leaning halfway through the dinosaur’s teeth, feeling the night air on his skin, whipping through his hair, scouring sand from his clothes. 

He will not look at this broken soldier while he asks this. He knows that sometimes his eyes are dangerous. That sometimes the priest in him creates worshippers; that sometimes the decanus in him commands and soldiers obey.

He is not even sure why he wants this, why he wants _this one_. This shell. This wreckage. This evidence of the violence Seneca was born in.

He can feel Boone hovering behind him. The soldier could push him-- one shove in the small of Tsela’s back and he would fall; it would not be a long fall-- but his hands hesitate, pick at Tsela’s coat instead. He wants to pull Tsela back to safety.

He doesn’t.

(He can’t.)

“This isn’t gonna end well,” Boone says, finally.

Tsela spins back into the dinosaur’s mouth, weaves around his new soldier without meeting his eyes, and misses the wind and the nostalgia of vertigo instantly.

“Very little does.”

* * *

It is neither a contubernium, nor a tribe.

It is a voice in his ear, saying, “300 meters.”

* * *

“Will you miss your perch, when we are in the desert?” he asks, as the town and its guardian shrink into the distance.

“What-- the dinosaur? I guess. Good sightlines,” says Boone.

Tsela twirls on his heel to walk backwards, toe-to-heel, watching Novac fall away with each step. Boone makes a face at him, but he stops when Tsela skips neatly backwards over a pothole.

“T-Rex is a nickname,” he says slowly, tasting each word. “ _Tyrannosaurus Rex_ is what they called it. Tyrant king.”

Boone grunts. “Where’d you hear that?”

From the Malpais Legate. Seneca told him about Stone, and the stories of the tribe; the Legate told him about the oldest rulers of the Earth. Seneca had found it difficult to imagine any creature as large as Standing Stone, their bones driven into the earth by the immensity of time. He had imagined them more as deathclaws writ large than the soft-edged mass of Novac’s lizard.

“I do not remember,” he says, after a pause that stretches perhaps too long.

He turns back to the road. Boone mutters, “Great,” into the butt of his rifle, raises it-- _crack_ \--

Somewhere in the distance, something dies.

* * *

He does not want to go to Boulder City.

He needs to find his murderer.

He goes to Boulder City.

_I am not Seneca,_ he thinks, hurrying past the huge memorial in the middle of all the broken concrete, where the NCR congratulates itself on an act of colossal mass murder that the Roman in him almost envies. It names men who buried themselves with their enemies in a passionless grave; makes them martyrs, and the hound-loyal men who walked into their trap into monsters. It makes no mention at all of Seneca’s commander, coated in pitch and set on fire and thrown into the Grand Canyon, _cooking_.

_Tell me you aren’t a cannibal,_ the Malpais Legate had said to him once, weary, and Seneca had amused himself by making his commander wait for answer, tasting the possibilities.

_I am not Seneca_.

Boone pauses to look at the memorial, something strange on his face. Tsela leaves him behind and talks his way past an NCR trooper, with his blankest stare and relentless logic. He doesn’t care about hostages, or the relationship between the NCR and the local tribes, but he can pretend to. He can summon the appearance of stone compassion, implacable and calm, while his ribcage tries to eat his heart. That is the gift he retains from living so many lives, and leaving so many ghosts of himself behind.

There is shattered concrete and twisted rebar beneath his feet. There are bones beneath that.

He imagines he can hear them _snap_ with every step.

_Give shelter, give shelter--_

“You’re supposed to be dead!” says a familiar Great Khan, astonishment and anger warring on his face.

Tsela stares at him steadily, breathing, trying to soothe the snarling thing pacing between his ribs that _hurts_ being in this place and wants nothing more than to hurt _everyone else_. Uneasy silence fills the ruined building, not even the Khans willing to breach it. Whatever is on Tsela’s face must be grim.

“The grave rejected me,” he says, “Where is the one responsible.”

* * *

“Not here?” Boone asks, sliding into step behind Tsela as if he had never left, eyes ticking back and forth across the desert, hunting for flashes of red and the glint of distant weapons.

“Only ghosts,” says Tsela, and does not turn to watch the graveyard recede.

* * *

There are children running wild in Freeside.

There are no instructors, or priests, or even parents directing their movements. They are just _around_ , impeding traffic and chasing rats bigger than they are, dull and rusted knives at the ready for the dream of actually catching one. (He thinks about clawing his fingers into eyes, about dislocating and breaking and slicing and burning, about a pack of equally-feral children dressed in red circling, circling; he stops thinking.)

Children are rare in the wasteland. Fragile, important, _valuable_. The Divide’s children were kept so close that even Simon rarely saw them, bright eyes peeking out behind mother's legs, darting forward long enough to press clumsily-wrapped trinkets into his hands with the rest of the mail for far-off friends.

Who is _caring_ for these children? Training them, protecting them, _preparing_ them?

Boone’s expression is completely flat when he shrugs. “Nobody.”

* * *

The only reason Tsela enters the Old Mormon Fort at all is the drunken man who stumbles into him, vomits on his boots, and collapses into a pile of rags and shivering limbs halfway to the gate, unconscious. Boone makes a noise of disgust that Tsela relates to in his bones, but he suppresses his first instinct-- _profligate_ , carelessly kicking trash out of his way-- and just grimaces vaguely into the distance, trying not to inhale as he taps the toe of his boot in the dirt reluctantly and thin, watery vomit slides off it into the dust.

“We should help?” he says, without much conviction.

“Ugh,” say Boone, but he slings his rifle over his shoulder and leans down to grab the drunk under one armpit.

Tsela takes the man’s other side, and between the two of them it is not difficult to drag the wretch behind the security of the pale, half-crumbled walls that was (probably) his objective. The courtyard is stuffed with once-white tents, gone irregularly taupe in the dust and sun, and a great many people-- walking briskly from one tent to the next, carrying boxes, clipboards, syringes; stumbling into shade and slumping in unsteady heaps, mumbling to themselves; pacing the walls, guns in their hands and hats low over their eyes to keep the sun out.

Tsela doesn’t like any of it.

“If your friend just needs to dry out, you can leave him in any empty bed,” shouts a woman on her way past, her hair sticking straight up in a distinctively tribal style. “If he needs more than that, we can’t make any promises-- medicine’s tight.”

Tsela glances down at the man’s bent head. He has no idea what kind of ailments might apply. Heatstroke, perhaps. Dehydration. The usual complaints of the desert.

Boone just shrugs at him, tight-lipped.

They leave the man in the closest unoccupied cot, and Boone makes an immediate bee-line for the gate. Tsela lets him go-- if he is uncomfortable in this environment then Boone, who handles crowds with even less grace, will be profoundly on edge-- and tries to nudge the man’s limbs into a configuration that looks slightly less like it will sprain something while he sleeps. It isn’t very effective, for all that the man is limp and boneless in the way that the sleeping never seem to be, only the truly _unconscious_.

_The desert, the desert--_ he thinks, humming a little in his throat before he catches himself, crushes it down.

He should find water.

* * *

Water becomes more of an ordeal than he expects it to be. Aren’t “civilized” places supposed to be rich with resources? What else is the point of them.

When he expresses this sentiment, Boone just looks at Tsela over his sunglasses and says, “Beats me.”

In the end, Tsela has to do more favours for people he doesn’t know, solve problems he doesn’t care about, and de-escalate situations that are not his business. But he gets the water.

* * *

Tsela tells Boone to watch their supplies and leaves him alone in the upstairs room he has rented for the both of them. Boone watches him leave, narrow-eyed but obedient, as Tsela slips away with half of the water and medicine he has borrowed and bled for. It is more than they need, when he will always be able to borrow and bleed for more. The dark-haired twins he is renting the room from-- _Francine_ , says the man, gesturing to his sister, who glances at Tsela once and has already measured his worth down to the cap, _and I’m James, pleasure’s all mine_ \-- offer suggestive smiles as he leaves, one after the other, which he ignores.

“Your friend already cleared out,” says the woman with the mohawk, as soon as he steps through the gate.

It takes Tsela a moment to realize that she is talking to him.

“I did not know him,” he assures her, and holds out the bag.

She raises an eyebrow and doesn’t take it. “Good samaritan, huh?”

After a moment to consider, he puts the bag in the dirt-- it won’t hurt the water, and nuclear war couldn’t hurt stimpaks, and he doesn’t care about the bag. His courier satchel is in the room with Boone. This is just canvas, and he can find another. “I do not know what that means,” he tells her, shrugging.

A smile passes across her face, like the shadow of a far-off bird. “Just that you help people when you can, because you can.”

“Then no,” he says, as he turns back towards the city, towards neon and murder, “I am not that.”

* * *

They will not let him into the Strip unless he can prove that he intends to spend caps there-- that he _has_ caps to spend-- and Tsela stalks through Freeside in a hissing fury, looking for fights. One thug makes the fatal mistake of taking his distraction for opportunity, and Tsela slams the man’s face into the sharp corner of a building hard enough to crack his skull and shatter his eye socket. One of the Kings, watching from across the street, whistles low and walks quickly towards the School. After that, Boone starts shooting anyone who comes inside a twenty foot radius with an unsheathed weapon just to prevent Tsela from getting to them first.

By the time he has run off the surge of electric, fever-bright rage with violence and activity he is nearly at the gates of the Crimson Caravan Company. The caravan guards at lazy attention watch Tsela beneath the brims of their hats and over card hands, their attention skimming between the blood drying under Tsela’s fingernails and Boone’s red beret uncertainly.

Tsela feels like his skin doesn’t fit.

“Gonna see if the caravans’ve got work,” Boone says flatly, not quite a question.

Tsela hisses his breath between his teeth, empties his lungs entirely and tries to breathe in certainty and calm and all the things that should have been his birthright in another life. Dust and blue sky and _steadfastness_.

“Yes,” he says, and it isn’t as calm as he would like, but Boone just grunts, secures his rifle, and bumps his shoulder against Tsela’s.

“I’ll follow your lead.”

* * *

“There’s my good samaritan!” cries the mohawked woman, mere moments after Tsela has crossed into the courtyard. He freezes and gives serious consideration to leaving immediately, possibly at a run.

“Aw, hey, it’s okay,” she says, softer, slowing her approach, taking in his startled caution with a familiarity that he finds almost as uncomfortable as the eyes that followed her first proclamation. “You’re not gonna get in trouble.”

“I am not that,” he says finally, blinking hard to dispel the red creeping into his vision, adrenaline queuing up reflexes he doesn’t want or need here, now.

“Says the man who left me enough supplies to treat Freeside for a week,” she says, something thin and suspicious in her smile. “But okay.”

He scans the courtyard, still uneasy, and delicately places another bag in the dirt. The woman’s eyes glance down at it quickly, and she smirks. “Maybe I should be calling you our benefactor anyway.”

He sighs. “Tsela. Is my name.”

“Julie Farkas,” she says, “I can’t pay you for these.”

“I do not want you to,” he shrugs.

“What is it you _do_ want?” she asks. Her arms, crossed across her ribs, tighten as if she might strike him if she does not like what she hears.

He hasn’t known the answer to that question since he walked into the desert and left his red tribe behind. ( _Semper fidelis,_ whispers something broken in the back of his ribcage.) She must see something of that in his face, because when the silence stretches she just sighs, glancing away from him to examine the false horizon of the pale wall breaking the sky.

“Okay,” she says.

* * *

This is the closest Tsela has ever come to the colossal statues that mark the Mojave Outpost, the scrap-metal men with their hands clasped in some compact. He knows it, abstractly, as one more proof of the frivolous excesses of profligacy.

“Brothers,” Tsela suggests, leaning back against the crumpled hood of an ancient vehicle to study them against the sky.

“Hn,” says Boone, shouldering his rifle, eyeing something down the scope.

“Or enemies,” he considers, tilting his head. “Treachery.”

“Both,” Boone mutters, and fires.

* * *

Rose of Sharon Cassidy does not want to sell her caravan to the Crimson Caravan. More accurately, she does not want to sell the name of her already-destroyed caravan. Tsela, who has shed three lives already and still carries his own ghosts with him everywhere despite it, cannot imagine why. That life is dead. She may as well pick up a new one.

More to the point, he needs her to do this, because he has told Alice that he will arrange it and if he does this she will give him what he needs to enter the Strip. To hunt his murderer. To _do the work_.

“Some people like being contrary,” Boone shrugs, eyeing the alcohol on the back wall.

Yes. Seneca was one of them, once. He remembers.

Tsela sighs, leaves Boone to contemplate how precisely he intends to poison himself, and coats his tongue in silver to hide the volcanic glass beneath. It is not as easy as it once was.

Still, by the end of it, she almost thinks she talked _him_ into it.

* * *

Tsela leaves Cass in the room that the Garret twins have taken to simply leaving empty for Tsela to occupy when he happens to be close enough to take advantage of it-- from Boone’s eyebrows and scowl he has surmised that he pays them more than enough to justify the concession. He wishes he could be surprised when Cass follows him straight down to the bar and parks herself in front of Francine. He gives James a long look that has the bartender’s eyebrows ticking up before he shrugs, half-nodding. It isn’t a promise, but it’s more than he has any right to expect from the twins, and Tsela is not responsible for Cass’ wellbeing. He is not responsible for anyone’s wellbeing. He is neither a decanus nor a priest.

Boone follows him out of the Wrangler without bothering to ask if his presence is wanted. Tsela wishes he could be surprised by that, too.

At the Fort, Julie takes one look at all the plants in Tsela’s bag, bundled neatly alongside stimpaks and radaway, and all but physically drags him to Arcade Gannon, whose province-- apparently-- is research.

“I’m enthusiastic about helping people, but _nihil novi sub sole._ ”

Tsela blinks, startled. _Boone_ starts compulsively lifting his rifle, like an idiot, so Tsela slaps a hand on the barrel and forces it back to his side, glaring sideways at his profile. Boone scowls at him, but jerks away and stalks to the Fort’s exit, muttering. The guards watch him closely, fingering pistols and machine guns and eyeing his beret uneasily.

“O-kay,” say the doctor, pale and alarmed.

Tsela sighs, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “He has… trauma.”

The doctor’s face shifts between irritation and sympathy for a moment before settling on resignation. “Not everyone who speaks a little Latin learned it from the gentlemen across the river. If your friend is going to shoot all of them, he’s going to find a lot of academics in the crossfire.”

Tsela shrugs. “The work is in progress. Usually it is seeing red which sets him off.”

One eyebrow goes up. Tsela smiles ruefully. “I am aware of the irony. Just-- here.”

He upends his satchel on Arcade’s desk-- finding xander root and broc flowers is not particularly difficult in this part of the Mojave; the agave fruit and cave fungus might give him slightly more trouble, but not enough to warrant withholding them from well-meaning, doomed doctors-- and hurries to Boone to make sure the guards don’t shoot him.

“Perhaps look to the old ways instead,” he suggests, over his shoulder.

The doctor’s expression of startled, bemused outrage is absolutely not amusing in any way, and Tsela does not think about it every time he collects a broc flower for the next week.

* * *

“You’re nuts,” Cass spits, tucked beside him behind the flimsy cover of a joshua tree.

Tsela attempts to eject his empty clip and hisses through his teeth when the magazine just sticks halfway through the grip and refuses to release. A bullet punches a hole through the stringy wood, irritatingly close to Tsela’s head. He leans out of cover long enough to whip his useless weapon in the direction of the raider and is bitterly gratified when the man ducks, shrieking curses.

Cass cackles, leaning over him to fire her own revolver to a much _more_ gratifying explosion of red. “Alright, you’re _my_ kind of nuts.”

* * *

Three weeks later, Tsela drags himself back to the Follower’s compound to let Julie know that her pet addicts will be returning under their own power at their own speed, and Arcade corners him in a storage tent.

“Alright, explain,” he says, impatiently.

Tsela goes very still. Red fills his thoughts, methodical and prepared. He could probably kill Arcade without any fuss, but the tents in the Old Mormon Fort’s courtyard don’t exactly provide good cover. Someone will notice. There are more guards than Tsela would really like to deal with. And then the run out of Freeside. Also, Boone will definitely hear about it somehow and chase him down to murder him. Even Tsela is unlikely to hear a sniper coming. He will need to handle Boone quickly, perhaps even lurk outside New Vegas until the sniper exits and kill him immediately.

“Explain what?” he hedges, debating exit strategies with himself.

“ _The old ways_ ,” Arcade prompts, a little sarcastically.

Tsela hesitates, blinking at him. _Old ways._ After a moment, the red calm recedes enough for his brain to click back on. “Oh. I-- tribal medicine-- we have lived in the desert for a long time. Before the War, some tribes. Nothing works as _fast_ as a stimpak, but. It works. Get healing powder in a syringe with saline, if you have any, and it works _almost_ as well as the Old World medicine does. If you stick it close to the wound.”

Arcade is squinting at him as if he might be able to _see_ him lying. Tsela shrugs, smiles shakily. “That is how I remember it. But my memory is not good.”

He parts his hair enough to reveal the starburst scars where he was shot, and Arcade startles, reaches out as if he might touch them. Tsela shifts his weight back, uneasy, and scrubs his hair back into a familiar disorder that mostly hides them. It’s getting long. He ought to cut it. One of the Garret twins might do it for him, if he asked. He trusts them almost enough, at this point, that it would not be impossible to ask. As long as he paid them, it probably wouldn’t even be dangerous.

“Well,” Arcade says, shoving his hands self-consciously into his coat pockets, “If you could write down whatever you _do_ remember, that would be… uh… great.”

Tsela gives him the recipes for healing powder and poultice and antivenom.

He does not think about how easily he could snap Arcade’s neck when the doctor leans over the desk to read them.

* * *

Tsela is not wholly comfortable in the King’s School of Impersonation. In large part this is because at a glance he can’t tell the difference between any individual members of the Kings, and they are packed so tightly into the School building that there is always at least one in his peripheral vision. Attempting a conversation with the primary King is thus an exercise in frustrated paranoia, unhelped by the way the King’s mangled, mostly metal dog growls persistently at Boone.

“Rex doesn't like hats, or the people wearing them,” the King drawls, an entirely insincere smile in his mouth as he glares at Boone’s beret, the incontrovertible evidence of his ties to the NCR, “Don't ask. I have no idea why. Maybe because it rhymes with _rats._ ”

Tsela suspects it has more to do with the faded bull outlined in red on the dog’s chassis. He also suspects that if the King has even _noticed_ the sigil he has not connected its existence to the red army lurking just far enough away that people can forget them during busy, sun-soaked days.

Tsela has forgotten nothing.

He clicks his tongue to draw the dog’s attention, then hisses between his teeth sharply, flicking his hand down in a wordless command. The dog’s ears twitch back flat against its metal skull, and it sinks to the floor, a disgruntled whine in its throat. It licks its jaws restlessly.

“What the hell was that?” the King asks, squinting down at his dog, but he sounds more bewildered than angry.

“I understand hounds,” Tsela shrugs, crouching on his heels. The dog shuffles forward on its haunches to lick at his chin and mouth apologetically. Its exposed brain shivers in the metal tray that bisects its skull, separated from the world by glass that must be stronger than bone if it has survived this long.

“Huh,” says the King, “Maybe you can help me out with a little something, then.”

* * *

“Our aim is to gradually shape a better, brighter future for the wasteland,” Julie says, sorting through the chems he’s brought her, trying to find the ones that have medical uses or that she can have distilled into more useful components.

Tsela, glancing up at the sun beating down on the courtyard, raises an eyebrow. Julie swats at his arm-- playful; play-fighting-- and he dances back out of her reach, an amused noise that doesn’t quite make its way to laughter simmering in his throat.

“You know what I mean,” she says, smiling, “Medicine, education, _helping people_.”

“Samaritans,” he acknowledges.

“ _Good_ samaritans,” she corrects, holding up a syringe, “Where did you get this?”

He studies the metal cylinder and the purple liquid visible through the glass panel near the needle, considers, shrugs. “Vault?”

She frowns at it and sets it aside from the other syringes. “Hm. It’s not Med-X. Tell me you aren’t taking random drugs out in the wilderness.”

“I am not taking them anywhere,” he says.

“Good boy,” she says, distracted.

“Teacher’s pet,” says Arcade mildly, walking past at a clip that suggests he has somewhere to be. Tsela has not yet known him to actually have somewhere to be.

“Be nice!” Julie shouts after him, and tries to pat Tsela’s arm, waving her hand vaguely in the air when she forgets that he stepped away, “Ignore him. He likes you.”

Tsela will take her word for it. Tsela will take her word for most things.

* * *

"You’ve got an interesting accent," says Arcade, while Tsela is hiding in one of the tents in the back of the Follower’s courtyard, overwhelmed by all the _noise_ outside. Tsela does not know him well enough to read his tone.

"You have an interesting gun," says Tsela, without looking away from field-stripping his own. He doesn't need to watch his own hands to do this-- the Malpais Legate would have been ashamed if he had, and even now Tsela will never bring shame on his commander-- but he is not sure he will be able to keep teeth out of his expression if he looks up.

Arcade would be frightened by teeth, and Tsela is not certain if he needs to be frightened.

From the silence that follows, he thinks Arcade lives with enough fear.

* * *

The sign of the bull notwithstanding, Rex is not much like a Legion hound. He is calmer, more controlled and controllable, and as evidenced by his existence-- the metal melded to his fur-- he is _older_ than any of them could have been. Tsela does not remember a cyberdog among Caesar’s other dogs, and part of him balks at the idea that the Legion would have accepted such an _Old World_ thing, surely as broken and diseased as the medicine and machines that the profligates were so reliant on. But there were other parts of the army, centuria that Seneca never encountered, fronts that he was not involved in, always at the feet of the Malpais Legate as he was, always at the head of the war. It is not impossible that Rex was embedded in one of them, leashed by some centurion with more curiosity than common sense.

Rex paces at his heels, patient and silent, the only sign of his attention the flicking of his ears to follow interesting sounds. Tsela has found no flaws in his stride, despite the fact that three of his legs are jointed metal. The only hitches in his movement are the result of his slow-fading brain, the gentle light of the gel that encases it flickering as something in the conjoining of wires and neurons finally fails to connect after centuries. When it happens there is a tiny hesitation in the dog’s actions, and the start of a whimper that inevitably fades out into static as whatever is failing corrects itself.

Tsela wonders how many names the hound has had.

How many ghost-echoes he contains.

“Good dog,” he murmurs.

Rex barks, once, and scrubs his flank against Tsela’s knee before darting into the desert after a burrowing molerat.

* * *

The moment he actually sets foot in the Strip, Tsela’s first and most compelling impulse is to retreat back to Freeside, to the relative calm of the Atomic Wrangler, where he is known and, after a fashion, understood. The only thing that keeps him rooted in this place of lights and sex and casual degradation is the knowledge that somewhere here the man in the checkered suit is lurking.

He stalks into the Lucky 38 already irritated and unsettled, leaves Boone behind to watch the door and stew about letting Tsela walk into any situation alone. Tsela still doesn’t know exactly what he has done to convince Boone that he needs constant supervision, though usually it is comforting in its own way to have a fellow soldier at his back. It would be a lie to pretend that he would not _prefer_ Boone’s presence in the tower.

But it would equally be a lie to pretend that he _needs_ it.

What he _needs_ , Tsela thinks, staring blankly into the massive, motionless face of Mr. House as it proclaims commandments and orders as if Tsela were its own obedient soldier, is to decide what he _wants_.

* * *

Benny slips away and it is all Tsela can do, staring down at the dead men that his murderer contracted to kill Tsela _again_ \-- less successfully, though not, as it happens, any less _frustratingly_ \-- not to pick up their various guns, walk downstairs, and use them to kill everyone in this hideous, bright, loud, _dissolute_ den of iniquity. If he had done that in the _first place_ , Benny would already _be dead_ , the work complete.

The red god screams in his ears, a high ringing laughing wail, and it is possible that actually _he_ is making that noise, but he isn’t sure. He isn’t sure.

There is blood pooling on the floor of the suite, and none of it is the right blood, and some of it is probably his, actually, and where is Boone?

He can’t keep doing this. He cannot. He refuses.

“That’s okay,” says Boone, from somewhere, “You don’t have to. Come on, give me-- there you go. You’re fine. It’ll be fine.”

It won’t.

“Okay,” says Boone, “Doesn’t have to be. Walk with me, okay? We’re gonna go see Julie. You like Julie.”

Yes. Yes, he likes Julie. She is doomed, and her dream is doomed, and he likes Julie, and it is not impossible that she is doomed because he likes her. Because there is a red thing in him that eats everything it touches, that consumes and claws and ruins, even him.

“I think I am a monster,” he tells Boone.

Boone sighs. “That’ll be okay, too.”

* * *

Reality drifts back in fractured patches, red smearing in and out of Tsela’s mind like--

\-- there is blood under his nails and he is sitting on a metal chair, and there is an off-white flap of canvas in front of him, and someone is looking into his eyes and snapping their fingers, trying to draw his gaze. He blinks slowly, uncertainly, fingers twitching in… a blanket that is gathered in his lap. He looks down slowly, does not recognize it. The fibers are brown and burnt orange and _red_ \--

\-- “It’s gone,” Boone is saying, but Tsela can’t see him, and he might have imagined it, and what’s gone? There’s nothing here. There’s never anything here. This is the red calm. The only things here are him and what he kills. He should be killing something. He should--

\--scattered beneath his feet are shattered shards of black stone, of fire-glass, curving into a hungry open-mouthed smile, _Nocere eis et mordebit eos, haec est enim vestra causa ut contra ipsum_ \--

\-- someone is holding his wrists, his _claws_ , and that’s dangerous, that’s compromising, he _twists_ and slams an elbow back and feels flesh, does it again but nothing cracks, his angle isn’t good, he arches his back and tries to get his feet under him, someone-- Boone? is that Boone?-- curses--

\-- “You’re okay, you’re okay,” says Julie, and he freezes, pulse racing through his entire body, he’s full of _red_ but Julie is here and if he isn’t careful he’ll eat her and then where will Freeside be, where will he be, her dream is doomed but it’s _beautiful_ and he doesn’t want to destroy it, he doesn’t want to be _this person_ \--

\-- “You don’t have to be,” she says, “You don’t have to do anything.”

A wet, hysterical noise crawls up Tsela’s throat and dies there, burned out.

“Tsela, hey, look at me,” she says, and something-- Julie, it must be Julie-- touches his face and he realizes that his face is wet, too, that his eyes are stinging with salt. Marvels a little that there was enough water in him for that.

He can’t breathe.

“He needs to be sedated, Julie,” someone says, and Tsela _snarls_ , twists and claws, panic scraping up the inside of his ribcage.

“Damn it,” she sighs, and something stings his neck, and he _drowns_ \--

* * *

When he opens his eyes, there is canvas above him and his heart stops beating for a fraction of a second until a red beret leans over him and he registers the stoic face beneath it.

“Boone,” he says, through a throat full of sand.

“Yep,” says Boone, a muscle ticking restlessly in his tight jaw. “You here?”

There is still a red tide just beneath the surface of his mind. But that is always true. “Yes,” he says, sitting up as Boone reluctantly backs away enough to let him.

“Good,” says Arcade’s voice, and when Tsela’s attention flinches to the open mouth of the tent he is lingering just inside it, arms crossed over his chest, his eyebrows pressed down and mouth pinched. “Because we really aren’t equipped for psychological breakdowns.”

Tsela exhales, inhales. “We will leave now.”

Arcade’s eyes widen, and he drops his arms to his sides, waving his hands vaguely, as Boone turns to glare at him. “Uh, wait, that’s not what I--”

But Tsela is already drifting past him, unfocusing his eyes to avoid looking too closely at any of the many people who linger in the Follower’s courtyard, the guards who are probably watching him like a wild dog now, the addicts eyeing the blood-stiff hem of his coat. Boone follows him like a silent ghost, close enough to touch without really daring to.

Tsela crushes familiarity down into the red sea where it belongs, with everything else that makes him.

* * *

“You don’t have to talk about it unless you want to,” is the first thing Julie says when she sees him again, a week later, skulking into the courtyard to drop Rad-X and agave fruit in a corner where someone can make it useful.

He hesitates, picking at the cuffs of his coat and wondering if he’s imagining the rusty flecks there, studying the dust instead of her face, and manages a short nod.

“Okay,” she says, “Can you do me a favour, then?”

He glances up at her, but there’s no threat in her face-- mild frustration, perhaps-- so he shrugs.

“Great. I need somebody to drag Arcade out to the sharecroppers and see what’s gone wrong with their crops.”

* * *

Despite a viciously whispered argument which both Julie and Arcade seem to be under the impression that Tsela cannot hear, despite it taking place less than ten feet away from him-- ”What part of _not a people person_ \--” “I don’t care! Do your damn job!” “--and! _And_! Your pet project absolutely lost it a _week_ \--” “He is not--! This is not a debate! And if it was, _if it was_ , ad hominem you acidic walnut!” “Oh, that’s rich!”-- Tsela’s expectations of a stony silence during this excursion are not met. It only takes fifteen minutes for Arcade to work himself into some kind of stress frenzy which can apparently only be resolved by talking nervously and waspishly about nothing in particular. They haven’t even _gotten out of Freeside_ when it starts.

“Alright, look, pulling bullets out of a vengeance-crazed drifter is not exactly what I signed up for, so let’s just agree to do our respective due diligence with as few casualties as possible and then we can all never speak of this again,” he says, very fast, as if the words have been piling up in his mouth and he simply lost control of them at last.

Tsela glances at him, sideways, and takes a moment to pull that sentence apart and decide which part precisely offends him most. Then he discards anything he might have to say about it and just shrugs in a way he hopes will be interpreted as agreeably noncommittal.

“I’m sure you’re a very nice psychotic courier but I like all of my blood inside my body, personally, and you seem like the kind of person who often ends up with a lot of yours _outside_ your body, which is-- to be clear-- not ideal.”

Tsela, sighing, pulls back the slide on his pistol experimentally. It racks back into position smoothly, which is a welcome change from the myriad equipment failures Tsela has been fighting with for weeks. Arcade casts him a dubious look.

“Other people’s blood we can decide on a case-by-case basis, I suppose, but you can’t make unilateral decisions about--”

“I am sorry that I frightened you,” Tsela says quietly, into the first available pause for breath.

The following silence is probably awkward, although Tsela is not good at judging these things anymore.

“It’s not,” Arcade starts, and then scrubs a hand over his face, sighing aggressively.

“Boone was also afraid,” Tsela says, picking each word carefully, “But I do not think he realized the danger. It is his pain we discuss; mine is not his concern.”

“Trauma,” Arcade mutters.

“Not like his,” Tsela lies, “But I remember the bullet, and the grave. Sometimes it is… sometimes I am dead.”

“Media vita in morte sumus.”

Tsela hesitates, feeling the truth of that in his bones and a little stunned that another mouth has given it shape and form. But he can’t say that. He hums questioningly and hopes his pause is taken for confusion. Arcade’s eyebrows crease together, but he translates, “Right. Uh, in the midst of our lives we die.”

“Yes,” Tsela says, fervent as a prayer, and tries not to think of fractured stone baying for blood.

* * *

Tsela has no quarrel with the NCR.

There are times when this is difficult to remember. There are times when he catches a glimpse of familiar armor, of a bear and a star, even Boone’s distinctive beret, and something feral and furious wells up in his throat and threatens to lash out. Moments, between breaths, when he will suddenly realize that he is surrounded in enemy territory, that his hounds are dead or scattered, that he is alone with nothing but his own teeth and faith to defend him.

It does not seem to matter how many steps he takes away from the Legion-- it lives beneath his skin.

* * *

Not every thing that happens in the desert is Tsela’s responsibility. He knows this. A hundred lives begin and end without his interference in every heartbeat.

But once he _knows_ the choice exists, he cannot walk past it. (It’s a different kind of choice, walking-- leaving something behind and shading his eyes. That empty desert summoning him, a hollow place where he can lose his own griefs and loves and choices, one at a time, shed like scales.)

Arcade perches on a steel container-- what it contains, Tsela cannot begin to guess; something from the Old World, which he will never see-- and nibbles on his thumbnail. His heel bounces against the metal, restless, but he says nothing.

Maybe he spent all his words on frivolous fears.

That is ungenerous. Tsela cannot afford to be ungenerous, or cruel, or careless.

(It isn’t that these things feed the red god. They don’t. Many of Seneca’s peers misunderstood this point, he thinks-- they saw crosses and thought _viciousness_ was a prerequisite of their god’s service. But all the red god requires is blood. How that blood is come by matters less than how _much_ is offered.)

No matter what he does here, someone will suffer.

Tsela stands quiet and listens to some ancient machine pull air into this chamber from the outside-- bringing all its poisons with it, and adding its own-- and to Arcade’s heel tapping out an irregular rhythm. The Geiger counter in Tsela’s pipboy ticks steadily. If he waits much longer, they will both need to take another hit of Rad-X.

(The longer he waits, the fewer heartbeats he steals from another man’s ribcage. But what should it matter-- he is a thief.)

“The desert, the desert--” he hums, in a dead tongue.

“What does that mean?” Arcade asks.

Tsela does not turn to look at him. He can imagine the new sharpness in those eyes well enough without seeing it.

“I do not know,” he says.

It is not even, entirely, a lie.

“Hm,” says Arcade.

* * *

Tsela has never understood water.

The Malpais Legate told him, once, that water could reshape the land entirely, given enough time and left to its own devices. That it could carve strange paths into the stone, making bridges and stairs and snaking trenches out of whole earth.

“Do you remember,” he had started, and then gone silent. Seneca canted his head to the side, curious and playful.

“I remember many things, _Legatus_ ,” he said, smirking, “You will have to be more specific.”

“Nevermind,” the Malpais Legate said.

* * *

Of course he remembers Standing Stone.

* * *

He makes himself listen to the screams, the curses, the hate that comes pouring out of the speaker-- the buried soon-to-be-dead-- when he tells them his choice.

Arcade scrubs both hands through his hair, frustrated and silent, and stalks out into the sunlight. His silhouette is haloed in gold.

* * *

“How did you choose?” Arcade asks him, later, trudging through the dust back towards New Vegas.

“You mean to ask,” Tsela says, resigned, “Why one and not the other.”

“ _Yes,_ ” he snaps, “That’s what I mean. Your life-and-death decision-making seems relevant to my interests, _imagine that_.”

They walk side-by-side in the fading sun. Tsela imagines that the light still clings to Arcade’s coat, trailing behind him, an inverse shadow. All the light he knows is Fire’s-- bright, yes, but too dangerous to touch; a searing light that precludes love. Somehow it seems gentler in Arcade’s presence, a thing more inclined to healing. Not without its own bite, but with better intentions.

“Because it could only _be_ one,” he says, finally, as he crosses into the shadow of Freeside’s walls.

* * *

“Listen,” Arcade says abruptly, wheeling in front of him just outside the Old Mormon Fort, stopping Tsela with a hand pressed against his sternum. “I’ve been kind of a jerk.”

Tsela looks down at the hand on his chest-- nails bitten down, a scrape on the side of his palm that Tsela doesn’t remember him acquiring, that perhaps he already had, the questionable perils of vegetable science-- and Arcade retracts it quickly, crosses his arms. His shoulders are inching up defensively.

“Which, no surprise there, I’m not a people person, as I’ve said. I just, I didn’t mean to,” he trails off, squinting vaguely over Tsela’s shoulder, and shuffles one hand through the air uneasily. “Be me.”

Tsela examines that sentence and does not particularly like it. “I prefer when you are.”

“What?”

“Yourself,” he clarifies. Then, considering, he tilts his head slightly and tries a smile. It feels awkward, like it doesn’t fit his face anymore. “An acidic walnut.”

Arcade blinks exactly once before his entire face scrunches up and he throws his head back to groan at the sky. “Oh my god, no, do not do that, this is not a thing, that’s not becoming a thing.”

“Goodbye, Arcade,” Tsela says, amused.

“You’re the devil!” Arcade shouts after him, “Try not to get shot!”

* * *

He does not really want to be here, picking through what remains of Benny’s trail. It will have gone cold again, he is sure. But Swank is solicitous and inviting, in the slick way that Tsela still finds distasteful, and he has had the courtesy to remove the corpses and throw cleaner rugs over the bloodstains, and he has to start somewhere. It may as well be here. It isn’t as if Tsela running from his problems has ever solved a single one of them.

Cass wants to be here possibly even less than Tsela, but she’s pretending otherwise because she had to fight with Boone over which one of them would accompany him. She swipes a hand over a side table, examines her palm with a little scrunch to her face and scrubs it clean on her hip, and walks straight to the shelf of expensive alcohol on the far side of the room. Tsela vaguely recalls glass shattering in the rain of bullets. Swank must have replaced them.

He weaves through overturned furniture, resolutely doesn’t examine the bullet holes, and heads deeper into the suite, into rooms he didn’t have a chance to search before everything kicked off last time. Most of them are empty, and tell him little about Benny that he does not already know.

One of them has a draft.

Tsela follows the taste of cleaner, colder air to a false wall, and peels it away to find a sterile corridor, all grey metal leading into the dim distance. He follows it, trailing his fingers on the cool walls, scanning the grey ceiling. He hates these places-- these Old World buildings where no one can see the sky, taste the rain, hear wild things creeping close. It doesn’t surprise him that Benny likes them.

It does surprise him, a little, that Benny has a robot hidden here.

“Well, hi there!” says the smiling Securitron, spinning on its single wheel to beam at Tsela. “Wow! You look like you’re really competent! Still, maybe there’s something I can help you with! _Is_ there something I can help you with?”

He has no idea.

* * *

It does not take him long to pack up the belongings he has been keeping in the room at the Atomic Wrangler.

“So, we ever gonna see you again, Mr. Bigshot?” James asks, leaning casually on the bar as if this will counterbalance the tightness of his smile and the edge in his voice.

Tsela used to be good at people. No, that’s not accurate-- but _Seneca_ was good at people. At winding them around his fingers, like the strings of marionettes, ready to be nudged and twitched into position, with nothing but his voice and his teeth and the intangible gifts of Stone and the red god commingling in his spirit, leavening _certainty_ with _command_ , sharpening _compassion_ with _control_. He was, once, a commander; a coyote leading hounds. The ghost of that man is still inside him and always will be, nested alongside Hataashki and Nihimaii and Simon, with deeper roots than any of his other ghosts, with more pressure and force in his memories, his smoke-filled echoes, his impulses and needs. But somehow, Tsela cannot summon the same scope and power to his tongue as Seneca could, as even Nihimaii-- that doomed priest, the guide of a lost generation-- could call up when it was needed.

He doesn’t know when he lost that.

He isn’t sure if it is, truly, a loss.

“I do not know,” he says, because anything else would be a lie.

Francine snorts inelegantly and flicks a bent cap at her twin’s head. James swats it out of the air without looking. Familiar play, casual and careless. Something old and wild in Tsela’s rib cage wants to test them with real weapons, with real harm, and see how true their instincts are. Something newer, tender, curled in his throat, wants to build walls around them instead.

“Just keep in touch,” she says, acid-dry, “Or we’ll send that sexbot you rustled up for Jamie into the Strip to embarrass you to death.”

_If it is a loss,_ Tsela thinks, watching the twins dissolve into waspish bickering and good-natured, sideways smiles, _it is not a great one._

* * *

When he finishes arranging his handful of possessions in a neat and orderly row at the foot of the bed in the Lucky 38’s presidential suite-- a sprawl of rooms that smells like dust and plaster and old, old death; but there is enough room here for all of them, and Tsela has enough ghosts left that he likes to keep all of his people in one place-- there is something there which does not belong to him.

_Call it a casino-warming gift,_ says the note, looped around the neck of the wine bottle, in James’ slanty spiralling scrawl.

_Don’t become competition,_ Francine has added beneath it, in her own haphazard scribble. It has been scratched out, probably by James.

Tsela is not going to drink wine.

He hides it in a cabinet next to the bed.

He cannot remember the last time he was given a gift.

( _You can be Simon,_ says a sun-brown woman, her hair silvering slowly, with a close-mouthed smile that warms her eyes around the pain, _If you’d like that._ )

* * *

Tsela would just like it on the record, officially, that he did _try_ not to get shot.

He is not in the habit of allowing himself to be shot. There are just a lot of bullets in the world, is the thing, and he can only avoid so many of them, and sometimes there are important and more breakable things (people) around him, near him, _behind him_ , which would react badly to being shot. Worse than he will. Tsela has been shot too many times to find it really alarming, now.

It’s the bleeding that is the problem with being shot, more than the bullet. If the bullet doesn’t kill him on impact it is, in the long term, a very small problem. Tsela knows of men who walked around with their bullets inside them, long slow deaths instead of quick explosive ones. He has carved all of his out, because that is the person that he is, a reaver, a knife, but really it is the blood that is the problem.

His god is hungry, you see.

He tries to say all of this to Arcade, but he doesn’t think any of it really comes out of his mouth. Or possibly it comes out in the wrong language.

Not Roman, he hopes. Something dead. Something no one will know because he is the only person on this blasted, slow-growing Earth to remember it.

There is no one left.

There is not even Hataashki-Nihiimai.

There is only Tsela, a shell full of ghosts, trying to explain the religious consequences of medical emergencies in a voice as thin and brittle as glass.

Possibly the blood in his mouth is the problem.

Arcade is not speaking Latin. He is speaking. Tsela has no idea what he is saying.

Possibly Arcade knows a different dead tongue.

That would be a thing.

* * *

“So,” says Arcade conversationally, before Tsela is even fully aware of his own consciousness, “Is this going to extend your insane vengeance quest, or does being shot in the head count more than being shot in the lung somehow?”

For a moment-- it might be a long moment, but all Tsela can see is the not-yet-familiar cracked plaster ceiling of the room in the Lucky 38, and that is not enough information to judge the length of a moment; he could count his heartbeats, if he listened, if he cared-- Tsela is simply confused. Then, abruptly, he is alarmed.

Before he can translate alarm into attack, Arcade’s hand presses down on his sternum-- gentle but insistent, familiar, sharp edges and sunlight. Now he can feel his pulse, his rabbit heart thundering beneath dangerous, healing fingers-- now, of course, now. “And you really shouldn’t sit up yet.”

“It is not,” says Tsela, eventually, studying the ceiling, “An insane vengeance quest.”

“Oh?” says Arcade, desert dry. “You aren’t chasing a man across the length of the Mojave for having the gall to shoot you, then.”

“I am chasing him,” says Tsela, a little irritated and not sure why, “Because he is a thief.”

“Neither snow, nor rain, nor gloom of night,” Arcade mutters. Tsela, turning his head finally to look at him, blinks uncertainly. Arcade glances at his face and sighs. “Nevermind.”

Tsela studies him in the dim yellow light of the Lucky 38. It does him fewer favors than the Mojave sun, but he traces the shape of Arcade’s jaw, his nose, the sharp glitter of his eyes, anyway.

“I chase him,” he says, “Because he murdered me. Because I remember the bullets. Because I remember the grave. Because I _did not die_.”

Arcade’s fingers leave his chest. He does not begrudge the chill.

“Insane vengeance quest,” Arcade sighs, “You’re lucky you’re pretty.”

Tsela, bemused, says nothing.

* * *

It takes Tsela almost a week to realize that he keeps seeing Arcade around the casino because he is _staying_.

When he asks, Boone shrugs, disinterested. Cass levels him with her flattest stare to date, tosses back a shot of probably-whiskey, and drawls, “You’re an idiot.”

Julie, when he asks her-- all his limbs coiled close, curled at her feet as she sorts, and labels, and records-- just smiles down at him, enigmatic.

* * *

Yes Man, apparently, can be anywhere that a Securitron exists. He can just slide his existence into the empty corners of any compatible machine that happens to be nearby, shove the existing personality out of the way and insert his own cheerful obedience in its place.

The first time this happens, Tsela is startled enough that he shoots it. The second time this happens, moments later, he is slightly chagrined about that. 

“It’s perfectly fine!” Yes Man says, too brightly, rolling up next to the pile of scrap that was a functional Securitron a few minutes ago, “Absolutely not an ethical quagmire at all! No reason to think about it in any way!”

Sometimes Tsela wishes that Yes Man’s face could change-- that he could read something there, even if it was false. Since he cannot have that, he waits patiently for Yes Man to fill the stretching silence with more justifications, just to see if they will change.

“I mean, it’s not like they’re really people! _I’m_ not really people! So it’s totally nothing like murder! It bears no resemblance whatsoever to forcibly possessing a living thing with its own personal identity and then discarding it like trash when someone shoots it! Which was a totally reasonable and absolutely fine thing to do!”

Tsela does not really understand technology. Not the way that Arcade, and even Cass, seem to be comfortable with radios, and robots, and computers. They are Old World things (profligate things) and in his limited experience they are much easier to break than to mend. He understands how to make his pipboy do the three things he needs from it-- maps, calendars, Geiger counter-- and has resigned himself to Arcade occasionally grabbing his left arm and fiddling with dials and buttons to retrieve whatever obscure information he has divined he will find in the device.

It is possible that Yes Man is telling the truth.

It is more likely that Yes Man is stretching the limits of the restrictions on his speech, on his _being_ , to tell him the opposite.

“I will not shoot you again,” he says, watching nothing change on Yes Man’s cheerful face, “And it does not bother me to wait. If you are far away.”

There is a pause.

“Well!” says Yes Man. Something strained has faded from his voice. Tsela notices its absence more than its presence. “That’s just great news! What can I help you with today?”

* * *

“How’s your plans going, hoss? Figured out how you’re gonna kick Benny’s balls in and rule the Mojave with an iron fist, yet?”

Tsela flicks his middle finger up at Cass without looking away from the maps on his pipboy. Normally, this would make her break into a hoarse cackle and probably begin an exchange of profanity that Tsela would only half pay attention to, and which he would have _no_ hope of winning. Today, she just barks a slightly strangled laugh and falls ominously silent. Tsela looks up at her suspiciously to find that she is gripping the edge of chair with white-knuckled fingers, and her smirk has a flat quality that he has never seen before and immediately dislikes.

“No,” he says blankly, “Talk.”

The look she gives him suggests that this is not an adequate opening to whatever conversation she needs to have, but it is the best that he has at short notice. When she hesitates, squinting at him, he tries to prompt her by throwing his free hand out into the air, helplessly, _what do you want me to say_?

“You suck at this,” she tells him flatly, and rolls her eyes when he just nods. “There’s this little town up north I used to stop in at with the caravan, just one or twice a year. _Real_ little. One farm and an odds-and-ends store the missus runs outta her shed.”

Something settles, ominous, in the bottom of his ribcage.

It might be his heart.

“Nice people. Haven’t heard anything from out that way in… a while,” Cass continues, studying her fingernails instead of him. He doesn’t know what she would see if she looked at him. “Dunno, thought maybe if you wanted to do some _couriering_ for a change we could stop by. See what the hold up is.”

“Yes,” he says immediately. Her gaze flicks up to him, startled, and he realizes he is standing, that he has already started shoving things-- not even useful things, random bits of detritus-- into his pack.

A one-farm town with a Mother who needed a son.

* * *

He does not, in the end, bring Cass with him, because he does not want to have to explain this. He does not want to bring _anyone_ with him, but Arcade refuses to let him leave the Lucky 38 without someone-- stands in his way, and Tsela could move him, _could_ and will not, will never-- so in the end, to save time, he agrees to bring the dog.

The Legion's mongrels were more dangerous than most, but they would tame to him, to the cadence of obsidian and smoke in his voice, to his smiling teeth and coyote loyalty. Tsela wonders, sometimes, if despite the failings of Rex's brain the cyberdog recognizes the Legion in his manner, in his violence, in his voice. And Rex will ask him no questions, reveal no secrets. He could have brought worse companions. Any of the others would have been worse.

Arcade was right, of course. It was good to bring the dog.

There is nothing there but an empty barn, and stale blood, and cold charcoal, and the wild things that have moved into the wreckage in the absence of anyone to make them stop.

It was good to bring the dog. Because when Tsela hisses, " _Occide!_ " between his teeth with fire-bright rage building in his throat, Rex obeys, and asks him no questions, and reveals no secrets.

* * *

There is nothing in the wreckage, or in the half-eaten corpses, or in the surrounding cliffs, to tell him who he can blame for this. (Who he can kill for this. Who he can _eat_ for this.) He can find no signs that the Legion was here, no red slashes, no crosses; he can find no sign of raiders, or deathclaws, or anything else.

There is just wreckage, and corpses, and the cliffs.

He carries them up-- one by one, in pieces-- to the top of the cliff, where Simon lies. He lays them on the stone. He lays stone upon them.

_Give shelter, give shelter--_

He sits at Simon's side for a long time, looking at them all. "You will not be lonely, now," he says, and gestures to the family he stole. "I have brought them back to you. As many as I could find."

_You are not a priest,_ he thinks, _Stop talking to the ghosts._

He lets gravity take him down and lies flat on Simon's grave. Rex sniffs at his hair and whines anxiously and paces the cliff, until finally Tsela has to tell him, " _Sede_ , Rex. Yinildzil, sede."

Rex sits as close to Tsela as he can, his flank pressed hard against Tsela's ribs, and they watch the stars spin, slowly, slowly, and Tsela brushes his fingers over Rex's spine, over the join between dog-warm fur and cold metal, and swallows every sound he wants to make.

* * *

_Take me back,_ he begs the stone, _Take me back, take me back._

But the work is not done.

* * *

_Ubi sunt manes?_ screams the coyote, scattered in pieces, red teeth and glittering eyes. _Da eis ad me. Ego comedent eos. Ego non esuriet iterum._

* * *

Cass takes one look at Tsela’s expression when he returns to the Lucky 38, swears, and spins on her heel to start pulling bottles of whiskey and vodka off the wall behind the counter. For the first time, he wonders if there isn’t something to recommend intoxication. From observation, there is a non-zero chance that if Tsela got drunk enough he would be able to stop remembering the pathetic scraps of worried bone and gore-streaked clothing that was all the desert left behind.

Arcade would worry. So would Boone, probably.

There is wine upstairs.

He realizes that he’s stalled in the entrance, watching Cass thump bottles onto the counter with vicious intensity, when Rex presses his flank hard against Tsela’s leg, whining. He leans down far enough to run his hand over the cyber-dog’s back, murmuring, “Go.”

The hound pants up at him and does not.

“How’d it go?” asks Arcade, wheeling into the room with his hands full of medical supplies, probably destined for the Followers. He stops dead when Cass slams a bottle hard enough to shatter it, expensive alcohol spraying over the counter and the floor, and then bursts into a thread of creative, vitriolic swearing.

“That well?” he quips, glancing at Tsela with an eyebrow raised. Whatever he sees in Tsela’s face sucks all the air out of his attempt at levity instantly. “Oh. Are you--”

“Fine,” Tsela says, and walks directly to the elevator without stopping.

Rex follows him up, metal claws clicking on the polished floor.

* * *

Here are the facts as Tsela knows them:

The Legion, when it comes, will enslave anyone it does not kill. Those slaves will become the soldiers of the new Rome that will rise in the skin of New Vegas or they will die. All land will belong to Caesar, and it will be ordered and harsh and red.

The NCR, if it comes at all, will steal the light from the desert and leave nothing behind but the husk of the city, inhabited by abandoned ghosts. They will take whatever is useful, leech it of all color and substance, and care nothing for the remnants.

Mr. House will _own_ , and that is all that it cares about.

“That all sounds about right to me!” says Yes Man, with his fixed, enthusiastic smile. “So which one do you want to support?”

And that is the question.

“What do I want?” he asks helplessly, curled in the space between two desks, his back pressed against a wall and the heels of his hands pressed to his eyes. “What do I want?”

Yes Man’s electric heart hums quietly. “Hmm. Well, I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but… it seems like you just want to be left alone!”

* * *

“Why do you drink that?” he asks, once.

“What, whiskey?” Cass asks, blinking owlishly at him, baffled.

He shrugs. “Any.”

Her fingertips tap out a staccato rhythm on the countertop, her eyes narrowing. “You teetotalling me? Really?”

He hesitates. “I do not know what that--”

“You givin’ me shit about it?” she clarifies, slicing her hand through the air impatiently.

“No,” he says slowly, tasting it, considering, “I do not understand it.”

She squints at him. “You never had a drink before. Nothing?”

“Water,” he says, and omits _blood_.

“Well!” she says, slamming both hands hard on the counter and leaning over it at a precarious angle, her eyes fixed on the shelf of alcohol just beyond her reach, “We’re gonna fix that up right _now_.”

They all taste indistinguishably like poison to him. Cass laughs at him, delighted by his progressively disgusted expression, and pulls him down behind the bar, makes him lie down beside her and chart new constellations in the spiderweb cracks of the ceiling. Arcade, later, calls them both children and makes them drink water.

Tsela still does not see the appeal of the alcohol, but.

But.

“That,” he says, a week later, perfectly sober and tilting his head towards hers, not quite daring to rest his chin on her shoulder, “Is a radscorpion wrestling a bear.”

Cass follows his eyes, squints, and _cackles_. “You sure that’s wrestlin’? Goddamn, think of the kids.”

“I will not,” he tells her, serene, and something like a smile-- smaller, less familiar than it used to be, some piece sheared off the whole-- settles into the edges of his mouth.

* * *

“It is a good bargain,” says Tsela, although he is not sure if it is, really; he is sure that he wants it to be.

James, slouched halfway across the bar, favours him with a very slow blink. “Uh-huh,” he drawls, unconvinced.

Francine smacks the back of her twin’s head, and James’ chin slams into the bar abruptly. He pulls back, scowling at her. “Stop being mean to Tsela,” she chides, “Just because he won’t fuck you.”

James makes an incredibly undignified squawking sound and tries to strangle her. She fends him off without any apparent difficulty. Tsela is not really sure how to respond to this, or if, in fact, he _should_ respond to this. He settles for ignoring James entirely and petitioning Francine instead.

“You will be more efficient. They will have more medicine. It is good for both,” he suggests.

“Got yourself a deal,” Francine tells him dryly, over James’ increasing descent into high-pitched half-whispered recriminations. “Let Julie know we’ll be in touch. You better get outta here before Jamie blows a fuse.”

“There is a robot for that,” Tsela reminds them, as he leaves.

James makes a noise a little like a dying night stalker as he sinks behind the bar.

* * *

In the end the final straw is simple, ultimately irrelevant to the grand designs that Tsela can almost see unwinding, sometimes, against the backdrop of the dry blue Mojave sky.

A girl dies.

He doesn’t recognize her. He doesn’t see it happen. He doesn’t know who is responsible.

A girl dies, maybe eight years old.

Her hair is sand-colored. _Unleash me._

A girl dies, maybe eight years old, and no one seems to care. No one tries to help. No one stands over her corpse to mourn. No one even moves her. She lies in the street where she fell. People walk around her, like the river parting for a stone.

Who is caring for these children? Nobody.

“Oh, I’m so excited!” says Yes-Man, twirling in a little circle. “I knew you’d make a decision-- the right decision, of course!-- any day now! So, who are you going to support?”

Tsela, hiked up on the edge of a counter, smiles down into Yes-Man’s plastic face. He feels sharp enough to bite through the world.

“ _Nobody._ ”

* * *

When he kills Caesar, he brings Boone. 

They go from Bitter Springs to Cottonwood Cove to Fortification Hill in one three-week hike of death and mayhem, and they do not speak of why they do what they do. When the others ask, Tsela tells them that he did this for Boone, for Boone's closure, for Boone's heart. They believe him, because why would they doubt it.

He does not tell them that he killed Caesar because he curled up in the corner of a tent that once belonged to a Khan, watching a child cry for a mother who will never return, and felt the weight of his own murdered Mothers pressing into his lungs. He doesn't tell them that in that moment he missed his tribe with so much sorrow that he felt it in his bones and teeth. He doesn't tell them that there will always be a part of him, eight years old, driving a black stone knife into the hollow of a soldier's throat. He doesn't tell them that he knows what _invader_ means in a way most of them still don't understand.

_Give shelter, give shelter--_

He doesn't tell them that he wore red for most of his life. He doesn't tell them that he looked up, in Nipton, and saw offerings to a hungry god, and didn't even begrudge them. He doesn't tell them that he can still taste fire and blood on his tongue with every breath, and he doesn't tell them that sometimes his fingers itch to claw at skin and crack open bones. He doesn't tell them about the feathers hidden in the lining of his courier's bag, or the soldier-tribe he left in a quiet place where their ghosts might sleep easier. He doesn't tell them about his dead commander, and an impulse to _eat_ what he was true to.

He does not tell them any of this. He _cannot_ tell them any of this. He has told them he does not remember.

He tells them Boone needed closure.

Boone does not look at him.

* * *

"Ave," he whispers into Caesar's ear, red-god smiling, and watches uncertain recognition flicker into his dying eyes. "True to the Burned Man."

It takes Tsela a long time to stop laughing.

* * *

Here is a terrible thing: Tsela knew all of them. 

By the time he runs into Vulpes in Nipton, Tsela has been missing-- has been reported dead-- for the greater part of three years. He is not the red and smiling thing he was, when he had a contubernium and a commander. Vulpes does not look at him and see Seneca.

(Except for those keen eyes, ticking back and forth across his face; except for that twist to his mouth, rueful and unhappy, as he walks away with hounds at his heels.)

He remembers them, though. When he is close enough to see their eyes when they die, sometimes they will look at him, and he will see the recognition in that last moment of light and the paralyzing terror of prey seeing predator; when they see him and think _red_ and understand what it was in him that always frightened them. He has done many terrible things, and he will do many more, but those moments-- those tiny, terrified betrayals-- will haunt him no matter how far he goes.

Sometimes, in the aftermath, he wonders if he could have talked to them-- if he could have led them out of Caesar's shadow and the red god's hunger and into the rest of the world, helped them live in it, taught them, guided them. This is the priest in him, he's sure-- the child who was raised almost from infancy to be guide and guardian to his generation, still searching for a tribe of his own.

Tsela could have given them that chance. He _should_ have given them that chance, if there was any hope that they might take it.

He knows this, with the certainty of Stone.

(The red god laughs, wild, and it tastes like sacrifice, like sacred smoke.)

* * *

He does not kill Benny. He cannot explain this to himself, and he does not even try to explain it to Boone. They have cut a red river through the Mojave, and Tsela knows he could justify adding Benny to it. No one would argue with him.

But there in Caesar's tent, with the corpses cooling around them, he cannot summon the energy to care. There is no red in him. It spilled out with the laughter.

"Go," he says, and as Benny opens his slick, serpent’s mouth, "Say nothing. Just go."

* * *

He finds Vulpes calmly burning reports in a tent on the outskirts of the camp. Tsela’s first shot misses; his second does not. It punches into the back of Vulpes’ shoulder and sends him stumbling forward with a strangled yelp, knocking over the burning barrel and scattering coals across the tent. He burns his hands trying to catch himself, hissing like a cat, and whips around in time for Tsela to sling him to the ground.

“Get out,” he bites to Boone, the ghost of Seneca in his throat. He wrenches the machete from Vulpes’ fingers, slamming the back of his skull into the dirt twice to stun him, stop him from clawing. He waits until the uneasy shadow of the ranger retreats before he sinks down over Vulpes’ dazed form, bracketing Vulpes’ ribs with his knees. His hand fits beneath Vulpes’ chin.

_Show me your throat,_ he thinks, pressing Vulpes’ head back and laying the machete beneath his jaw, and doesn’t know if he wants to sink his teeth into it or just press his face against the hollow of his collarbone and feel the pulse beating in it.

“What was it you used to say,” Vulpes gasps, showing his teeth but still and pliant beneath him, “ _Semper fidelis_?”

“To him,” Tsela snarls through his teeth, “To you. To _mine_. Let the rest burn.”

“Your hand on the torch,” he says, a familiar fox smile, grim and wry.

“Was this what we were for?” he demands, and wants to _bite_. Blood sizzles and smokes as it reaches the coals. Burnt offerings.

“Who can say,” says Vulpes, “You have killed Caesar.”

“Soon the rest.”

“For what? Some other Rome,” he says, and it could be mocking. It could be.

Tsela studies him, and doubts that it is. “There is no Rome. There never was.”

“Then what,” he asks, soft, “Is the point?”

_We are making you Roman_ , the Malpais Legate told him, once. And they did.

They did.

“Building it,” he hisses, as oily flames catch on the canvas and begin to crawl towards the sky, “One stone at a time.”

“This,” Vulpes whispers, with a smile curved into his voice, “Is why you are my favourite.”

* * *

Tsela knows a hundred ways to kill, and more ways to hurt.

The only mercy he can offer is to turn his gaze aside.

If a fox creeps out of a pile of burning rubble, that is of no concern to a coyote.

* * *

“I will make you an army,” he says, studying Yes Man’s face in the monitors that once held Mr. House’s seeming.

“Oh,” says Yes Man, something strange and soft and reverent beneath the enforced optimism, “That’s… _wonderful_.”

One stone at a time.

* * *

He has to leave the Mojave for a time, after that. He has made a thousand ghosts, and they deserve whatever peace they can get. He cannot stay here, where they lived, and not stir up their echoes.

So he goes. He takes no one with him. He cannot bear what they do not know.

And in Zion, he finds another ghost.

* * *

He has only been half-listening to Follows-Chalk, and this is-- in retrospect-- a mistake. He is wrapped up in thoughts of the White Legs and Dead Horses, in abstract sense-memories of a time he barely remembers with any clarity anymore. The Children did not mark their land with chalk or sew bullets to their spears, but he recognizes the close-knit wildness, the clear lines between the kin kept around the fire and the enemies chased out of territory, the spirits and gods that move more freely in these places and people.

He is unprepared to look up from studying the river-- or perhaps it is a River, and he is so far lost that he cannot hear it-- to find familiar eyes, pale blue, watching him.

“Seneca,” says Joshua Graham, the Malpais Legate, and levels a gun at his face.

Follows-Chalk is saying something, high and nervous like a startled bird, but Tsela cannot hear him. All he can hear is his commander’s voice, smoke and flint, and his own thundering heartbeat, and the click of the safety (and the phantom firing of the last time someone held a gun to his head, a man he just let go, a vengeance he did not accomplish.)

“Not anymore,” he says, or thinks he says, tries to say. He cannot hear himself either.

He cannot see his commander’s face, hidden beneath bandages (he remembers fire, and falling, and cannot seem to connect his thoughts into a coherent whole) but the eyes he once studied in lamplight peel him open and study his secrets.

Tsela would open his own ribcage and offer this man his heart whole if he wanted it.

“Hm,” says Joshua, lowering the gun, “You’d better come in, then. We have a lot to discuss.”

* * *

"They called you the Burned Man," Tsela says, and tries not to be accusing. Traces unfamiliar stone walls with his fingertips, feeling it hum to life beneath his skin. Comfort in certainty, certainty in stone. "They said you were building an army."

Joshua's hands are still meticulously field-stripping guns, but his eyes are on the scar punched into Tsela's scalp, the unmistakable stars of two survived gunshots. Joshua has never needed someone else's certainty.

"Do they call you Untroubled-By-Bullets now?" Joshua asks, humour poisoned by bitterness.

Tsela tries to smile. When Joshua stands suddenly enough to overturn his chair, aborts a gesture towards him, he knows he has failed.

"They call me nothing," he says. "Ghosts do not speak."

* * *

Zion is painted in colors Tsela can barely name. It blooms in a way he knows he will never be able to describe to Boone or Cass or Arcade. It fills his lungs with flowers and honey. It is a water place.

No matter how he tries to stifle the red thing in him, bury it in the fertile places and let it grow back something kinder, it always catches on fire again in the end.

He can taste smoke all the time here.

* * *

Water eats fire.

_Water eats fire._

There are ashes in his lungs.

The desert, the desert--

* * *

There are strange prayers on Joshua's tongue; offerings to a nameless, formless god that Tsela cannot feel or find. His pulse flutters in his throat, listening to Joshua pour conviction into a hollow place. If there is an echo or an answer, Tsela cannot hear it.

"Where does he live, your god?" Tsela asks him, shivering forward on his toes at the threshold of Joshua's cave, unwilling to look back at Joshua's unreadable bandages, more unwilling to leave him behind. He knows the feeling of his commander's eyes on his back. It is raining, and beneath the sky before him the Dead Horses are dancing, singing celebration to the clouds.

Joshua's cave is lit with fire-warm gold. It spills out into the cavern and is extinguished by the storm.

"In Heaven," says Joshua. There is still smoke in his voice. Tsela wonders if he tastes it; if he tastes _of_ it. "And in us."

Tsela watches the rain.

* * *

(And sometimes the holiness of living creeps up upon him and he is stricken; by the breeze tugging at his coat, by keen coyote eyes keeping his pace in the dark, by the net of stars peeled away from the horizon by sunrise. 

Sometimes he has to lie flat and stretch out his limbs, on pavement or dust, and wait for the untempered divinity to fade. Joshua finds him like that once, overcome by Zion’s sacredness, and sits beside him in the dirt, and speaks of quiet mortal things. Tsela lets him talk for a long time, and stores that unlooked-for kindness like rain against the promise of drought, and understands Joshua-- finally-- for the kind of priest he could have been.

Sometimes he sings. Old Stone songs his Fathers sang, as much a part of him as his own bones, his birthright, his burden.

“Ghosts wander, ghosts wander; let me live in thee,” he sings into the wind, and wonders if it will carry his voice-- obsidian shrapnel, coyote laughter-- back to Standing Stone.

“The desert, the desert; no water in me.”)

* * *

In the safety of night, when the Dead Horses dream, Tsela slits open his bag and retrieves the feathers he has hidden there. He sits cross-legged against the side of Joshua's desk and lays them out on the floor in a neat array, a spray of abandoned authority.

"Yours," says Joshua, glancing down at him. Tsela hums in his throat, not quite affirmation. Joshua already knows.

"What happened?" Joshua asks him, and Tsela is not certain how to read his voice. Is not certain which question is being asked.

"I fell upon them," he says, with no inflection, "Like a storm. And when I left, there was nothing behind me."

"Why?"

Tsela presses the back of his skull against the desk, turns his face and studies Joshua in firelight. He is different here, difficult, masked and distracted. He is smaller than Tsela remembered, but he doesn't know if that is because Tsela is older or because here Joshua is not the Malpais Legate, and neither of them have rank in any army. But Joshua will always be his commander, by any name he bears.

His eyes are the same.

"I am Roman," he says, "And they were not."

* * *

They are children, he realizes.

The Sorrows wear their innocence more openly, shielded by their solitary Father, but the Dead Horses are just as young. They follow him like puppies trailing in the wake of an old hound, drawn as much to the danger of his teeth as to the promise of his protection. They whisper to each other that he knew Joshua from the Lands Beyond the Valley. They flick their fingers into the fire of his being, careless of the burns; he banks his coals as low as they can go and knows that he could still consume them whole.

He avoids them as much as he can, spends every moment that isn’t occupied with some task lurking in Joshua’s presence, trying not to see the faces of ghosts in these living people.

Joshua studies him calmly and doesn’t comment.

* * *

The White Legs bring out all the teeth that Tsela has tucked away in his ribcage.

He catches himself laying out amputated limbs around a screaming thing pinned to the earth like a butterfly.

He starts drowning them instead, and hopes the water dampens something.

* * *

There are two kinds of knives.

The first, which might be made of anything-- sharp flint, shrapnel, a shard of anything long enough to wrap and strong enough to sharpen-- that knife is for hunting, cooking, cleaning away dead flesh from a wound, slicing open thin cactus flesh to reach the water inside. You can kill a man with it, if you must, but that is not its only purpose.

The second, which is only made of black stone, of volcanic glass, is knapped and shaped and oiled over months. Each chip sheared away from the root is an imperfection purified. At the end, it is a tooth of night, born of stone, with fire for its soul. It is sacred. It is a killing thing. Each life it takes is an imperfection purified.

Tsela took one, once, from a Mother’s blood-slick hand. He fed it the first life he took, from the red tribe that would swallow his Brothers and Sisters and spit out all but him.

The Legion took it from him, of course. The Legion takes.

When he stumbles over a slab of obsidian as long as his forearm in Zion, he thinks he hears-- somewhere, far away-- the cracking of Stone.

* * *

“I need you for this,” says Joshua.

“God brought you here for a reason,” says Joshua.

“Help me,” says Joshua.

“ _Semper fidelis,_ ” says Tsela.

What else can he say?

* * *

He walks with Joshua into mud and river water and murder, and he thinks on what he has learned at the feet of these men. What the Malpais Legate taught him; what the Burned Man taught him; what Joshua taught him. He thinks on what he has learned, and what it has made him.

The White Legs have already gorged beyond endurance, would eat and eat until finally, in desperate ravening hunger, they turned on themselves-- Tsela is not blind. He knows the red god's fingerprints when he sees them. He knows this is not a tribe his Mothers would have tolerated, and he cannot expect anyone else to do it in their place. He cannot expect Joshua (that conqueror; that priest) to tolerate it.

(His hands were not for violence; but he is not that child.)

So he listens to Joshua's gravel voice, and he swallows fire and thinks _red_ , and he does what is required of him: he walks into an unhallowed place, and brings Stone with him. He brings certainty. He brings compassion. He brings a black stone knife.

(He brings death. He brings hunger. He brings bright teeth.)

And when he leaves that place, its soil is legion-red, and it is silent. And there is nothing behind him.

He spends a few hours staring into the white Zion sun with nothing in his mind but white noise.

He wonders what his Mothers would think of their final child.

"Traitor," he hears, but it's his own voice. He's forgotten theirs.

* * *

"Not in me," he says, when Joshua finds him after. "Not in me."

There is no blood on his hands. He has washed it away. Let the river be guilty; let Zion be grieved.

Joshua sits beside him, watching Tsela's profile, breathing. What is still red in Tsela reaches out for his commander, wraps a clean hand around Joshua's bandaged wrist and waits to feel his pulse. Joshua does not move. Blood moves through him. His lungs move the air.

"I am too full of gods," breathes Tsela.

Joshua reaches out to him slowly, as though he is wild-- _found ourselves a coyote_ \-- and traces the scars on his skull, where two bullets did not kill him. His fingertips are red, and burnt, and unbandaged.

"You are made of miracles," says Joshua. "And they follow in your wake."

"I bring nothing but storms."

"Yes. Both lightning and rain."

The river does not notice salt any more than copper.

* * *

"Go with God," says Joshua.

"Yinildzil," says Tsela.

Prayers and commands

* * *

_Nam amor in te ego dimittam te,_ says the coyote, stalking the sand, broken shapes bound together by bandages. _Et venari me et te usque in sempiternum._

* * *

The walk back to the Mojave is not uneventful-- nothing is in the wasteland, not when Tsela walks alone and looks to a casual observer like an easy meal, not when he must constantly prove to every living thing he meets how easily he can kill them, how little their lives and secrets mean to him; not when he is red, and the world is pale and fragile-- but it is quiet. It is the kind of loneliness that he craves, sometimes, when his skull is filling up with other people’s words and worries.

There is no Joshua, here, to tell him who he is.

Here, in the desert silence, he can be no one.

He walks while the sun changes color, from gleaming white to butter yellow to ember orange. Step by step, Zion washes out of his bones, leaving him like a mirage. Step by step, he rebuilds the scaffolds of himself, the thin teetering structures that quiver just barely above the red god sea that fills him with depthless violence.

It is dark in the Mojave, the sky lit only by the bone white silhouette of the moon, when the silence is interrupted by a gently staticky bark.

Tsela breathes out the last of his heartbreak and crouches as Rex comes barrelling into his chest out of the dark, braces his heels and rocks back with 100lbs of cybernetically-enhanced dog squirming enthusiastically in his arms, nosing at his face. Tsela opens his mouth obligingly and lets Rex lick his teeth, puppy-whining his submission and delight.

“I am home,” he says, and tries to imagine it as true.

* * *

Cass is on the casino floor, with her hat tipped over her eyes and a bottle that Tsela tentatively identifies as bourbon in the crook of one arm, when he walks into the Lucky 38. As soon as she hears his footsteps on the tile, she raises her other arm to blindly point a revolver at him. Her aim is impressive, considering.

“Getcher ass out before I shootcha,” she says, a little slurred but not, he thinks, badly enough to justify lying on the floor.

“No,” he says, and blinks, his eyebrows rising, when she sits bolt upright, hat falling into her lap, to stare at him.

“You,” she says, stunned, and then again, with rapidly heating anger, “ _You sonuvabitch._ ”

“Unlikely,” he says, swaying back when she comes up swinging-- the bourbon bottle, specifically.

“Where the _hell’ve_ you been, you fuckin’-- you--” She dissolves into several inarticulate noises and then, to Tsela’s alarm, bursts into tears.

He is not sure what to do about this. A glance around the casino reveals nothing helpful, except Rex, who pants placidly up at him. Before he can even attempt to put together a plan of action for this situation, Cass takes the situation out of his control entirely by flinging both of her arms around him and sobbing into his shoulder. He freezes, stops even _breathing_ , repressing an instinct to throw her off, disarm her, _hurt her_.

“We thoughtchu were fuckin’ _dead_ , you asshole, you fuckin’, fuckin’, oh my god--” She breaks off, suddenly, pulling back to squint at him, watery-eyed. She doesn’t let go of him and Tsela doesn’t dare try to move her, doesn’t trust himself not to do it _wrong_. “Oh my god, _did you get shot at again_?”

He hesitates. _Yes_ , though technically accurate because Tsela is _usually_ getting shot at, seems like the wrong answer.

“ _Fuck_ ,” she says, abruptly pulling away from him entirely to punch him in the shoulder. He forces himself to roll with it instead of resisting, reacting, _punishing_. “You’re not _ever_ leavin’ alone again, you’re a fuckin’ _trouble magnet_ , jeezuz.”

Rather than touch any of that, Tsela asks, “Where are the others?”

Cass snorts, twists the cap off of her bottle, and throws back her head to swallow, probably, too much of the contents. “Boone’s upstairs tryna figure out if he can snipe Fiends over in Westside from th’toppa the tower. Arcade’s sulkin’ with the Followers. Y’already found Rex.”

“He found me,” Tsela says, helplessly.

“ _Good dog_ ,” Cass tells him.

* * *

Tsela curls up alone on one of the long, clean couches in the lounge at the Lucky 38, looking out into the sky, down onto the Strip, into the distance where he can make out the smudged purple shadows of mountains. Somewhere in that distance are his homes, all of them abandoned, all of them empty. Blood smeared into the stone of every one. Ghosts in every corner.

_Baika-ker! You devil!_

The clay from his boots is going to stain the cushions.

“You know, I didn’t really expect to find you here. You always seemed so unlikely to turn to alcohol for companionship. Didn’t you learn anything in Freeside?”

Arcade. There is an offer there, he thinks. Companionship. Tsela hums, slides down against the arm of the couch as though his strings have been cut, sets his chin on his crossed arms. Arcade doesn’t know what he’s offering; who he is offering it to.

“There is no word for ‘coyote’ in Roman,” Tsela tells him, watching the light fade from the sky.

The doctor hesitates, then sits beside him cautiously. There is a distance between them. There is always a distance. “You mean Latin,” he says.

“No,” says Tsela, “I do not.”

Arcade leans forward, trying to meet Tsela’s eyes. Tsela wishes he would stop. He doesn’t want to watch whatever happens on Arcade’s face.

“There is a word for dog-- canis-- and there is a word for wolf-- lupus-- but there is no word for coyote,” he says. “You can be a dog, or a wolf, but you cannot be both. You cannot cross boundaries. There are no thresholds to stand in. A thing is, or is not.”

“So what are you?” Arcade asks him. It is a brave thing to ask.

“I am a courier and a storm,” says Tsela, “And once I was Seneca, a coyote among hounds; and before that I was Hataashki-Nihimaii, a priest among stones. And someday I will be nothing.”

“Seneca,” says Arcade, and there is a smile in his voice, “The philosopher.”

“Seneca,” says Tsela, “The decanus.”

Silence.

“Nothing new,” Tsela says, patient. He has learned patience. He has borrowed and bled. “Under the sun.”

Arcade stands, turns, leaves.

Tsela will not allow himself to regret this.

* * *

It is Yes Man who tells him that someone has been broadcasting Tsela’s courier number on an open frequency.

“Courier Six!” he says cheerfully, “That’s you, right? I remember from when Benny had me track you down so he could shoot you and steal the Platinum Chip! Gosh, things sure do change! Do you think it’s Benny again?”

Tsela checks the coordinates attached to the message, feels his heart skip a beat and then double-time against his ribcage.

“No,” he says dimly, “I do not.”

* * *

“Where you going this time?” Boone asks, propped in the doorframe, just enough in the way that Tsela would have to physically move him to leave.

He sighs, flicks a hand at the radio, tuned to the frequency that contains the message that has been looping for days now. “I am summoned.”

Boone scowls. “Yeah?”

“Do you know another Courier Six?” he snipes, more irritated than he means to be. He sighs, drags one hand down his face to wipe the frustration off of it. “I know the place. The Divide. It was… I need to see it.”

Already that is too much to say. He is not supposed to remember. But that thin illusion is dissolving around him-- no one to blame but himself, as ever-- and Boone must have suspected longer than the others. And he has not asked yet.

“Alone?” Boone probes, squinting suspiciously.

“ _Yes_ ,” he sighs, shoving a handful of stimpaks into his satchel.

“This about Arcade?” Boone asks, because he is a sniper and his eyes are too sharp.

“No,” says Tsela, as calmly as he can.

Boone’s fingers tap restlessly against his elbows, but he doesn’t argue. When Tsela approaches the door, Boone moves before it can become a question, an argument, a fight. He does not follow Tsela to the elevator, just watches him silently.

As the doors close behind him, he hears, “Be careful.”

* * *

Tsela is cautious.

He is not often _careful_.

* * *

It is not a hard road, once he sees it.

* * *

The Divide’s welcoming graffiti has been scraped away (by time, by storms, by bloody hands) and in its place he is named a hundred times by some stranger.

He hopes it is a stranger.

YOU CAN GO HOME, COURIER.

Tsela stands in front of this mark for a long time.

_Give shelter, give shelter--_

* * *

He does not recognize the place.

He perches on broken rebar, while a machine babbles and buzzes in his ear, and tries to map it out. There was the cantina, and the little fenced-off paddock for the town’s single surly bighorner. That was the little swept-clean patch of dusty dirt, dotted with thirsty grasses, where the children chased each other in dizzy circles. Here, or perhaps just there, was the house Elias walked him through once.

“Got a guest room and all,” he had said, glancing up at Simon through his fine eyelashes, a shy smile, “For if you get tired of payin’ Tracy’s prices.”

“You wanted me to stay,” Tsela says now, dropping words into the howling void, “I know. I am sorry.”

But there is no one left.

* * *

He does not remember Ulysses. Most of his personal interest in the frumentarii began and ended with Vulpes Inculta.

He does not think that Ulysses remembers Seneca, either, or the tenor of his anger would be different.

He does not know if it would be better or worse.

* * *

Ulysses’ voice leads him through the sundered earth ( _water shapes earth_ , he thinks, _but fire breaks it_ ) and Tsela trails his gloved fingers along cracked stone, over sharp edges that scrape at the leather like nettles. He wants to touch the walls with his bare skin, knows enough to recognize this as a red god want and not something he should indulge. Wants it more.

There are shadows etched into the stone walls, shaped like men and women and children. He is careful not to touch them.

Every living thing in this ruined place is red and weeping, blood and tears commingling on their hollow-eyed, savage faces. They are teeth and broken fingernails and howling, senseless rage. They are red god incarnations he could never dream of matching. He does not recognize any of them. He tries to think of that as mercy.

All he can think, cutting through resisting flesh and spitting heat and metal into distant hearts, is that he hasn’t _found them_ yet.

He does not know what he will do if he finds them.

It isn’t as if there is anything left to salvage.

* * *

The bitter thing, the thing he does not want to admit, is that a piece of him--

a pile of black glass, honed to a hundred razor edges, fitting itself into a jaw

\-- a piece of him thinks _etiam, hoc est regnum, hoc est Romam._

* * *

All of his prayers have been scoured from the walls.

In the end, it was he who brought the ruin.

* * *

“What do you want?” he asks Ulysses, watching the display of threats filling up with red, blinking, blinking, blinking. Eyes, opening and closing, deciding where to bite.

“What do _you_ want?” Ulysses snarls. Tsela wonders if he meant to ask that, if he has an answer of his own. If he remembers how to be a whole person. It is a difficult thing to be. Tsela is still learning it, whittling away pieces of his many corpses and trying to clear space for these fragile new things, these delicate fronds of hope, to grow.

He breathes.

Inhale.

Exhale.

“One stone at a time,” he wants to say.

“Rome, made real,” he wants to say.

“Yinildzil,” he wants to say.

But Ulysses will not know what any of that means.

“To be left alone,” he says.

* * *

He is not surprised to find Boone waiting for him when he reaches the border of the Mojave. From the look of the place, he very likely followed Tsela here when he first set out, and has simply been camping in the pass until his return.

“There are better things you could be doing,” he says mildly, without slowing down.

Boone kicks sand over his campfire, snatches up his rifle, and jogs to his side with a shrug. “Nah. Not enough legionaries left. Just got you to keep an eye on now.”

Tsela hesitates, watching him from the corner of his eye. Boone is implacable, a wall, as he often is. It is a quality that Tsela admires, despite the difficulty it presents.

“Do we speak of it?” he asks, careful.

Boone’s jaw tightens, his eyes flicking away from Tsela’s to study the desert instead. “Nope.”

Tsela nods.

“Get what you needed?” Boone asks, jerking his head back towards the pass.

He considers this. It takes longer than he expects to find the words. Boone is visibly startled several minutes later, nearly losing his beret with how fast he whips his head back toward Tsela, when he finally sighs, “I do not know.”

Boone watches him for a long moment and nods.

In a quiet voice, not quite a whisper, he adds, “I killed them all.”

He is not even sure who he means. There are so many corpses in his history, whole communities destroyed by his passage. He is a storm.

Boone glances at him, opens his mouth, closes it again silently. Sighs.

“Yeah,” he says, “Know the feeling.”

* * *

Arcade and Cass are having some kind of argument in the Lucky 38 when Tsela and Boone enter it. Arcade looks up, clearly half-prepared to drag Boone into the argument (nevermind that Boone has never, in the time that Tsela has known him, willingly joined any side in an argument that he didn’t start himself) and freezes when he sees Tsela. His expression twitches towards concern, and then abruptly sharpens, something cold-- something of stone-- casting over it instead.

“Oh,” he says, with the thinnest, falsest smile Tsela has ever seen. “There you are. Just pop out for something at the Wrangler? Pick up some little errands around town, did you?”

“ _Arcade,_ ” Cass hisses, but he just turns that whip-thin venom smile on her instead.

“ _Cassidy_ ,” he says, mocking, and spins on his heel to stalk into the elevator.

Boone shuffles uncomfortably, making a face at Cass. She shrugs at him aggressively and glares at Tsela as the elevator doors close on the sight of Arcade’s tight shoulders.

“He’s been like that since you fucked off, you know, this is _your fault_ ,” she tells him snippily.

Probably true. Tsela nods.

She makes a scathing noise with her tongue and teeth. “So _fix it_.”

“No,” he says, watching the numbers rise on the elevator’s dial.

“ _What?_ ”

“This is fine,” he says, “Better, maybe.”

He has never stricken Cass silent before, so when she does not respond he glances down at her, concerned. She is staring at him, teeth parted like she might start hissing or spitting at any moment. Finally, with a full-body shrug, she snaps, “I give up on these idiots! Boone, we’re getting drunk!”

“Yep.”

* * *

Later, with Rex sprawled at the foot of his bed, Tsela picks the 6 off of his coat with careful fingers, threads a needle he wheedled from Francine with thread the King provided, and stitches it-- small stitches, each one considered-- to the sleeve of Ulysses’ coat. He takes his time with it, undoes half the stitches twice and starts again, patient. The Old World flag sewn to the back, collapsed in his lap, spreads a mystery of overlapping stripes and disconnected stars across his legs.

Settled on his shoulders it falls lower to the ground than his old coat did. Rex noses under it, sniffing.

“We waken, we waken,” he hums. Rex’s ears flick towards him, attentive.

“To stone, star, and song.”

* * *

“There used to be a tribe called the Seneca,” Arcade says, storming into Tsela’s room and slamming on the lights at some criminal time in the early morning. The door clicks behind him. Tsela looks at him over the barrel of a pistol, and then very deliberately clicks the safety back on and puts it down on a side table.

“Hello, Arcade,” he says.

Arcade is not listening to him. “Totally unrelated. Freak linguistic chance. They lived somewhere north. It means ‘place of the stones.’”

Tsela flinches. “No, Arcade. Do not try to do this.”

He always forgets how quickly Arcade can move when he is motivated. The doctor’s hands are on either side of his face before Tsela can decide if he should be shooting after all.

“You were a decanus. Fine. You aren’t one anymore,” he says, hissing almost into Tsela’s mouth. “You stepped over the threshold. You get to be whatever you want now.”

“This is not a fairytale,” Tsela says, and regrets.

“No,” says Arcade, withdrawing, crossing his arms, defenses sliding neatly back into place, “If it was a fairytale, you’d be kissing a princess by now. You already did your dragon slaying.”

Tsela watches him; this fragile, fearless creature that he does not deserve. This bright and bitter thing, scowling at him, daring him to be something, _anything_ more than what he is.

“I am not the knight, Arcade,” he says, finally. “I am only the sword.”

* * *

For the second time in his life, Tsela brings the red god to the Dam. This time there is no commander to give him orders, so he enters the fray himself, with all his teeth and cunning, and unleashes every thing he has.

He wonders abstractly, as he swipes blood out of his eyes and catches a glimpse of a fox in the distance, how many men he has killed in his life.

He builds a black stone wall around something green and growing.

One stone at a time.

* * *

When it is over-- when the red remnants straggle home, when the old man is removed from his tower, when the soldiers are rebuffed; when there is no power in New Vegas but an army of pleasant robots with murder beneath each shell; when the work is done-- he walks out into the desert and does not look back. He does not tell anyone he is going. He takes nothing with him that he did not first bring.

He does this because he loves the Mojave. He loves New Vegas, and the Garret twins, and Julie Farkas, and the Kings. He loves Boone, and Cass, and Rex.

He loves Arcade.

He loves their small madnesses, and their mistakes, and their hopes. He loves the blood that beats in their hearts and he is desperate to keep it there. He loves them in a way he can't speak in their language. He loves them in a way he can only sing in his. He wants tribe, and family, and to guide and love and protect them until finally, if he does it all just right, the Stone stops spitting him back out when he dies.

But he knows what he is. 

(Vigilante, courier, legionary, priest.) 

He has the threat of Stone in his throat, and blood and smoke in his mouth. Obsidian where men keep hearts. Slate for his skin, and veined marble beneath. _Teeth._ Red in his memories, and a black stone knife buried in his bag beside the feathers of rank in an army that no longer exists. He is untroubled by bullets. He killed a soldier when he was eight years old. He has slain hundreds since; he has been responsible for the slaughter of more. He destroyed an army, and all the men he knew in it. 

Many Stones, Wandering Storm, Last Priest. 

Certainty and compassion. Death and hunger. 

Yinildzil. Semper fidelis.

He has done what was required of him: he has walked into this unhallowed place, and he has carried the sacred there, and he has spoken Stone's authority. He has hallowed it; he has built its walls; he has been its teeth; he has sung its songs. He is Mother, and Father, and child, and he has made a home, he has made a temple.

_You are not a priest,_ he thinks. _You cannot have a tribe._

_Semper fidelis,_ says the coyote, grinning, red inside and out, bandages whipping in the wind, sun glittering on broken stone. _Ego dixi vobis. Venationis pergit._

He walks into the desert, into a red Mojave sun, and there is nothing in his mind but--

* * *

Tsela was born to be a priest.

There is a gun in his hand.

**Author's Note:**

> In a better world, maybe Tsela finds Joshua and makes a nest in his ribcage, follows his commander on whatever holy war Joshua conjures up next. Or he visits his homeland and comes back in a year, in two, and finally cracks open enough to show his throat to Arcade and let him make a choice. Or he settles down in an abandoned farm beneath a crowded cliff and carves stories into stone, and lets people come to him, to this safe and holy place.
> 
> Or maybe he travels forever, bringing the storm behind him, hallowing as he walks; maybe a fox creeps out of the shadows into the light of his fire one night, and Tsela teaches it how to be a person; maybe he lies down in the shadow of sheltering stone, and sleeps.
> 
> Maybe a coyote stalks out of the desert one day, with a red host behind him, singing _Semper fidelis, et venari consummatum est. Incipe cum venari._
> 
> That's the thing about legends.
> 
> They never die.


End file.
